The Vertigo of Realizing Your Life is Your Life

There's a sensation that sometimes suddenly seizes me, although I think I can manufacture it to some degree, when I am struck by the reality of “Oh yeah, this is my life. I live here. In this body. My parents are so and so. My spouse is this person. I look like this and I breathe and I was born and I will die.” And the sensation can be disorienting, can cause a kind of inward sense of unbalance.

It's as if, in the process of living my life, I get so immersed in the minute by minute of living that I lose the summed perspective of being-who/what-I-am. And when it strikes me it sometimes feels foreign. As if I had forgotten who I was and somehow I was expecting something else. I wonder if my brain knows it's a brain?