an existential crisis spurred by a vegetable peeler and a lemon

Photo by okeykat on Unsplash

Yesterday while skinning a lemon using a vegetable peeler, I inadvertently skinned the top of my middle finger, carving a tiny notch in the space between the top knuckle and the cuticle. “Owww!” I howled, then watched dumbfounded as dots of blood seeped out from the underlying layers of skin before running to the bathroom to fetch a bandaid.

Now, out of curiosity, I zoom back into that angry “oww” moment. I remember wanting to blurt out: “how dare you!” at the vegetable peeler. As ridiculous as it may sound, the vegetable peeler had insulted me. It had treated me, a human, the same way it treats a lemon or any other fruit or vegetable with a discardable outer layer.

Alas, to the human wearing an apron a lemon is merely an aggregate of usable and unusable parts: the peel (fragrant, aromatic), the pith (unpleasant, inedible), the segments (divine, symmetrical), the pulp (deliciously sour), and finally, the seeds (unpleasant, a nuisance). When the human peels the lemon, she is separating the usable from the unusable and the later-to-be-used. But to the vegetable peeler, a human’s skin is no different or more useful than a lemon’s; it is merely another thing to be peeled. This is an existential crisis for the human who, at the moment of accidentally peeling herself, finds out that she is emotionally incapable of shedding her skin as easily as the lemon sheds its peel, for she views her skin as an integral part of herself.

When I arrived back from the bathroom I saw a thin sliver of myself stuck in the vegetable peeler. Slightly repulsed, I quickly folded it into a paper towel and threw it in the trash before tossing the peeler in the dishwasher. A rushed, unceremonious burial compared to my existential outcry moments earlier. And now a lingering question still tugs at me: if my skin is inseparable from me, then why didn’t I die the moment it was injured? And why don’t I self-destruct with every paper cut? How many scrapes of skin, bone, and other anatomical stuff would it take to annihilate the “I” which I think of as me?