When I Look for My Self I Find the Sun and Other People

When I go looking for my self, my own personal "I," all my own, I keep finding other people.

For instance, I am right this instant sitting in front of a computer typing in this blog post. Why can I do this? Why, because I can type. Why can I type? I can type because about 40 years ago in a business class in high school Mr. Moran taught me to type. 

So who is typing this? me or Mr. Moran? or both of us?

I am not sure of the answer to this question. Certainly, my fingertips are making contact with the keys. So on the surface, I am typing. But this typing is wholly dependent on my having learned how to type, which is Mr. Moran's doing—in that strange windowless room with 35 other students banging away on manual typewriters.

I went looking for my self and found Mr. Moran and my fellow typing students.

And what am I typing? I'm typing words. And where do the words come from? I don't remember my first words, but I imagine I spoke them to my parents. I assume I learned language from listening to them and my older sister and mimicking them. So my words come from them.

And not only them, but all the teachers and friends I've had over the years, and all the authors I have read and so forth. They are now coalescing in this moment of my churning out words by tapping on the keyboard. I go looking for my self and find other people.

Someone may point out that no other person, not even Mr. Moran or my mother, can know what I am thinking. My perspective is my own. That is where my self is. 

But my perspective constantly changes depending on the situation I am in and the people I am with. For instance, when getting a car loan I represent myself in a completely different light than I do when I am talking to my therapist. In the former case I present myself as competent, clear-headed, and sure of myself. In the latter I let out my insecurities and doubts and worries. I have to. If I didn't have them, there would be no reason to see a therapist.

Which representation is the real self? Neither. When I look for myself, I find other people. The people who are around me determine how I represent myself. If I want a car loan, I represent myself as competent. If I want companionship, I represent myself as genial. If I want you to give me something, I represent myself as worthy of it, or I may represent myself as threatening.

When I am alone with no other people around, am I then my true self? Is that where it can be found? I am alone right now. How do I represent myself to myself right now, as I write this, alone in my apartment? For one thing, I push aside all the doubts and insecurities that I may present to my therapist. Having them now would overwhelm my writing and make it impossible for me to carry on. But they are there, in the periphery of my consciousness.

To be honest, I am not sure I represent myself as anything. I am focused on the job. On putting one word after another, to create sentences and paragraphs for you, my reader. But this is not my own private language. This is English, shared by people in certain countries around the world. I am moving in the pathways and ruts and trails made available by this shared language, a language I learned from my parents and my sisters and my teachers and friends.

When I look for my self, I find other people. 

Not only do I find other people, but I find nature, too. My "self" exists because of my brain and heart and the rest of my body. This is clear. But I am equally dependent on the sun. The sun is as necessary for my existence as my heart. The same is true of the biosphere of the earth. My body is not separate from this biosphere or this heat source.

I went looking for my self, and I found the sun.

Someone may say that my self is in my own personal memories. When I look at my memories, I find condensation and selection and dramatization. I don't find one-to-one correspondences. For instance, how many hours did I spend in Mr. Moran's typing class in high school? three hours a week for 15 weeks is an estimate. That's 45 hours. When I remember it, it comes back in momentary snippets. I don't remember the whole 45 hours: those hours have been condensed way, way down into small memories. They come to me when I need to make use of them, such as now, when I am writing this essay about whatever my self is or isn't. Memory is a reconstruction of the past for the purposes of the present moment.

My self is others and is nature. Could someone else have written this blog post? I think so. Nothing I have written here is terribly original. All of it has been said before. I am putting a spin on it that may be unique, but the ideas are not original.

Is this "spin" where I can find my self? I don't think so. My "spin" is the result of my complicated relation to other people and their ideas about the self and language and memory. Am I adding something new to this centuries old conversation? 

Maybe a little. But do we want to say our self is dependent on the rare and isolated times when we are original and creative? Usually, when we think of "self," we think of something that persists through time.

Rather than a self, perhaps I can consider myself as an agent in the larger community of people and nature. A persistent self is a lot of baggage to carry around. I am always part of larger contexts. Perhaps I just move from context to context and respond, hopefully well, to the needs and exigencies of that situation.

There is no center to hold, and this is a good thing. It allows me to more fully respond to what is at hand in the contexts I find myself in. 

And what is this "I" that I write about in this post? It's a grammatical marker. The real me changes constantly, responding to and improvising within contexts always somewhat familiar and always somewhat new. The baggage of a persisting self couldn't do this.

It's true that I have characteristic improvisations that I consistently use. These habits are perhaps what people point to when they say they "know" me. But I change these improvisations all the time. Why should I assume there is some central kernel that persists through all of this? Where is it? Not believing in a self is a bit of a loss, but giving up on it reveals to me how intimately I am connected to my community and nature. This is comforting. It helps me to respond to the needs and exigencies of the present moment in all its complexity.