Walking Lettuces

They say you are born as a blank sheet and from that point on you start getting written on, painted, scribbled, carved, folded, crumpled, and sometimes torn. I say you are born a self. Your self was right at the surface. Then they start teaching you to un-self yourself and you start burying your self light years deep underneath layers of your other selves, like a lettuce, like the layers of clothes that my grandmother wore and seemed to me interminable.