It's just me.

All week I've been having dreams on a recurring theme: I've lost my wallet, along with all my I.D.  As I search for it in subway stations or piles of trash, I fret over how much hassle it will be to re-create my identity.

Deep down, things have been shifting.  The movement is slow but sure, like the creep of continental plates.  You can't see the movement with your naked eye, but, over the years, it'll push up a mountain range.

When I started high school, I was quiet and shy.  While other kids were making friends with their new classmates, I sat very still, not sure if I should hope that someone would speak to me or hope to be left alone.

Eventually some kids did speak to me, and I made friends.  Some of them were good kids who I'm friends with to this day.  One of them was a troublemaker: Elizabeth.

Elizabeth had had a rough life.  Her folks were divorced, and they were crappy parents.  Her mother would specifically tell Elizabeth not to bother her for a while when she hooked up with a new boyfriend.  She was simply not welcome in her mother's home a lot of the time.  Her father, whom she lived with, was bonkers.  There was a lot of crazy, enraged shouting when things got going at that house.

On top of it all, Elizabeth was a cancer survivor.  She had a glass eye, having lost the original to cancer.

In many ways, she was a bad influence.  She encouraged me to lie to my parents, telling them that we were at her house watching cartoons.  In fact, we went to the Eaton Centre mall by ourselves so that she could teach me how to shoplift.  (I did steal, although not more than half-a-dozen times all told.  I was a smart enough kid to realize that the consequences of being caught weren't worth the risk.)

Elizabeth messed up my head in lots of subtly manipulative ways.  But I did get one gift from her that served me well for 25 years.  She taught me how to be funny, turning bad situations into opportunities for wry and ironic comedy.  She was as jaded at 14 as any full-grown adult.

Sometimes it's healthy to laugh at our troubles.  Life is plenty ridiculous, no doubt.  Sometimes it's better to laugh than to cry, for a change.  However, eventually I started laughing when I should have been crying.  Sometimes I couldn't get past the ludicrousness to actually feel the beating heart of my life.  This ability to turn tragedy into comedy turned into a defence against feeling the impact of truly sorrowful events.

I got to the point where sometimes I hated the feeling of a wry smile twisting my lips.  There was too much bitterness in my laughter.  I couldn't stop hiding from my heart, and the hearts of my friends.

Thanks be to God, that is finally changing.  As I approach my 40th birthday, I am ready and able to emerge from behind that shield of snark.  It's just me, sometimes sad, sometimes pensive, sometimes playful, and sometimes with a smile of  genuine, unadulterated joy.

It's a big change.  Ironic humour has been a major part of my public identity.  I'm certainly not leaving it behind entirely, but it's slipping into a less important role.  I'm not sure exactly who I am without that snarky edge, but we're all about to find out.