Reclaiming My Tabula Rasa

Philosophically and psychologically, I was conceived as a "blank slate", my birth pure - innocent...my consciousness a vast ocean awaiting its savoir faire of appropriate-ness for the social world on which I, unwillingly, had been thrust into. My new form, though petulant and quite sulky, still yearned in anticipation - leaning eagerly toward the accumulation of new knowledge and for my personality to be shaped by experience.

It was my Tabula rasa, this "blank slate," - the idea that individuals are born without built-in mental content, and all knowledge, thoughts, and behaviors are acquired through sensory experiences and interactions with the environment. Roman (tabula) that could be erased (rasa) and reused, symbolizing the mind’s initial emptiness.

Aristotle described the mind as an "unscribed tablet" in his work De Anima, suggesting that the mind has potential but is empty until it receives impressions from the senses. The Stoics and Peripatetics (travellers from place to place) further developed this idea, emphasizing that the mind starts blank but acquires knowledge through experience.

John Locke in the 17th century, argued that the human mind at birth is like "white paper, void of all characters," and that all knowledge comes from experience and reflection. This view is central to empiricism (all knowledge is derived from sense-experience), which contrasts with rationalism (opinions and actions should be based on reason), the belief that some knowledge is innate. Locke’s tabula rasa also underpins his ideas about personal freedom and the formation of character, influencing political theory and the concept of natural rights.

BUT - What have I allowed myself to become. I admit, that for the duration of my formative years, I had no control over my Tabula rasa - But why did I not harness the reins of my own development when my sense of responsibility kicked in and I had grown into my own person. Why did I allow society to bend and mold me into their version of what they thought I ought to be.

Why did I not fight much harder for my sense of self and individuality?

I Demand That My Tabula Rasa be Returned to the Slate and State of my first breath.

I have become a person who has lived so long inside other people’s handwriting that I have forgotten the shape of my own beginning. My mind - once a wide, untouched surface - has become a palimpsest, a manuscript - a writing that has become effaced, erased to make room for later writing - yet traces still remain - of expectations, obligations, inherited scripts, and the faint ghost-ink of systems that claimed to know me better than I ever knew myself.

I have carried these inscriptions like a second skin. Some lines were beautiful. Some were heavy. Some were written so early I can no longer tell whether I had chosen them or merely learned to perform them.

One night, I argued...one night when the world is quiet enough to hear the soft whispers beneath thought, I will feel a tremor inside - it will be small, but unmistakable. A longing. A pull. A memory of the Roman wax tablet: tabula rasa, the slate that could be warmed, softened, wiped clean, and made ready for new marks.

These would not be erasures of destruction... but Erasure as my return.

Erasure as permission.

And so I will then journey to the edge of their inner world, where the old inscriptions still stayed written, waiting for the moment of rediscovery. I will place my hand on the surface of my own mind and whisper:

“I am ready to be rewritten by my own hand.”

I imagine that the slate warmed beneath my touch. The old grooves softened. The inherited lines loosened their grip. The system’s handwriting - those rigid, plastic strokes - began to melt like wax under a rising sun.

My past was not destroyed, it simply released its authority. The slate did not become empty. It became available.

A surface open to possibility. A field ready for new seeds.

A beginning disguised as a return to what was to have been.

And in that moment, I will understand:

The demand will not be “Erase me.”

The demand will be “Restore me to authorship.”

The world had written on them long enough.

Now it was my turn to choose the script, the symbols, the path of my rebirth.

I will lift the stylus.

The slate will gleam.

The first new line waited.

My Tabula Rasa...waited!

The system now is not working. But someday - someday...I will return.

For now...I Dream!