A self is deciduous, it leafs out as one grows, changes with one”s seasons, yet somehow stays briskly the same. The brain composes a self-portrait from a confetti of facts and sensations, and as pieces are added or removed the likeness changes, though the sense of unity remains, thanks to well-furnished illusions. We need illusion to feel true.
A medley of different selves accompanies us everywhere. Some are lovable, some weird, some disapproving of each other, some childish or adult. Unless the selves drift too far apart, that solo ensemble works fine and copes well with novel events. As the psychoanalyst Philip M. Bromberg writes in Standing in the Spaces: “Health is not integration. Health is the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them. This is what I believe self-acceptance means and what creativity is really all about — the capacity to feel like one self while being many.”
— Diane Ackerman, from An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain
I love these ideas: they reflect my experience of myself as a person and a writer, and I so admire when I see other writers working with them. And so I thought of them again as I was reading screenwriter Craig Mazin’s post about the insanity necessary to create good characters — which I imagine as standing between the spaces of my selves in order to create a self that isn’t me, and to make her so real that her story becomes real for you too.
And of course it’s not only writers who do this. As Mazin points out, we all do it when we dream (hmm, well, okay, I know people dream differently, but I tend to assume that things like this are hardwired…). And I suspect that there are many folks in the world, like me, who spend part of our lives enjoying “waking dreams” — for me, these are an odd but very enjoyable balance between seeing a private movie in my head and feeling/behaving as though I were really living it. It happens a lot with music, which is one of the reasons I love music so much. But these moments can come anytime, and I know they aren’t “real,” but they sure are real to me.
Is that insane? I don’t know. If it is, then it’s even better for me that I’m a writer and have made accommodation with it, have put some skill and framework around it. Have made a door for it to more safely open and peer out into whatever it is we mean by the “real” world. (More safely for whom, you ask? Well, that’s the real question, isn’t it?).
I hope all your selves are having a lovely day.
This is such an encouraging post! I’ve been doing so much work with my therapist lately, and she encourages me to seek out these many different parts of myself, because indeed, there are many. The tragic part of this all is that it’s only been after 33 years of living did I come to identify these many parts of ‘self’. I am just grateful that I am discovering them one by one, and I am also aware that there are SO MANY others that have to live day to day not knowing that they too have many different parts of themselves they can learn from.
It gives me such joy to know that I have a bright future ahead of me, knowing that I can love the many parts of myself, (whether they themselves agree with one another or not!) and that there is so much to look forward to in getting to know them. I’m glad to know you and so many others have the pleasure of this too.
I hope you have a wonderful day too Kelley. 🙂
Realmcovet, I really do believe that personality is not… hmm, how to say? Not seamless. People with no edges, no bumps, no unexpected gaps, are a little scary to me because they feel so constructed.
Not that we should run around letting our inner two-year-old out to play anytime she wants to — that gets a little old for everyone. But the two-year-old is there, no? It seems so pointless and self-hurtful to spend our lives either denying that she exists or trying to beat her to death. Better if we can learn to know and live with all our selves, to control what we must/can and keep trying to find that center from which we can see all our facets, integrate ourselves, get aligned with who we are.