And who are you supposed to be?

It's time for a shout-out to one of my favorite shows: Mad Men. For those of you who watch, you know what's so wonderful about it. And for those of you who don't, you should.

[Backstory for the non-watchers: Don Draper is the main character. We've found out over the course of 2.5 seasons that his name used to be Dick Whitman, and he came from a hillbilly farm family. Because of a mix-up on some Army paperwork in Korea, Dick got to come home if he said he was Don Draper, one of his buddies who had actually been killed. He did that, and became Don Draper. He went on to reinvent himself and get a smokin' hot wife and a high-powered Madison Avenue advertising job.]

I was getting caught up on the last couple weeks' worth of episodes on Saturday. I'll spare the details so as to try not to spoil anything, but I was watching the Halloween episode, where Don's present confronts his past, so to speak. One character (who shall remain nameless, to preserve the surprise) says something like "I don't even know who you are anymore."

At this point, my dad (who is not a regular MM-watcher but happened to be in the room) asked a question about the story, which led to an interesting philosophical discussion: if you spend a good portion of your life pretending to be someone else, at what point do you cease being the person you once were? When do you become the person you're pretending to be? At some point, isn't that who you really are? And what's more, isn't that what the American Dream is all about? If you're unhappy with who you are and where you came from, shouldn't you be able to change that, so that you can be the person you want to be?