mleiv.com

As a younger child, my memories were often challenged by older siblings. As an adult I have learned that sometimes this was correct (like my mental placement of the well at the house I lived at from age 0-5) and sometimes it was incorrect (like when my sister blamed me for setting the big kitchen fire, and it stuck). Memories are not fact, even when they seem like fact. We only see a tiny fraction of the detail, and we remember only a tiny fraction of that, and that memory fades and distorts over time like a slow game of telephone across our synapses. See: nostalgia.

But in the past few years it has occurred to me that by accepting the unreliable nature of my memory, I have actually hastened its decay. When I mentally challenge the accuracy of past events, my brain puts less and less effort into storing them. The snippets I do remember are now largely as distinct as your average fairy tale, and they seem to be located in the same place, because when I think about them it is a very distant and disconnected tale with little personal attachment.

In the past year I have begun to realize I have done the same thing with my personality.

I always thought I had it all worked out, that I knew who I was and how I would behave in unfamiliar circumstances. It's part of being a writer: being able to imagine how things would go, how everyone would react, how they would feel, what they would say. When my house burned down, I was the stable, logical one who knew what to do and who kept it together in all the weeks following. When dealing with irritating family issues, I was the one who bluntly removed myself from the group (sometimes, tearfully with lots of yelling). But then something happened to me three years ago and, in a wash of emotion, I did not react the way Emily would, the way I had always thought I would when I considered the event in years previous. I did quite the opposite. And I began to question EVERYTHING about myself after that.

I started noticing that my favorite colors change depending on the season. I can tell Christmas is close when I start wearing more red. It is summer if I prefer lime green. I develop a sudden fascination with fancy dishes right before Thanksgiving, but I hate kitchen clutter every other day of the year. I want ice cream when it's cold out. The causes of some of my other polar shifts are harder for me to identify, like the multi-year cycle of when I am seeking friendship versus when I feel beleaguered by social obligations. But I can still watch them come and go, without any fore-ascribed linear progression, vacillating with frustrating regularity.

I have concluded from reading many neurology books that none of us have a single, unified identity, but instead we are cobbled together from various contradictory motivations and responses to external factors. We morph depending on who we are with, what we are worried about in that moment, what our emotional state is, how hungry/sleepy/anxious we are... as others have observed: we are a herd of elephants with one little rider trying to direct them. And the rider (as some like to view our higher brain) is not US. It is too small to be who we really are: we are the whole group, running in different directions all the time. Any single identity we assign on top of this is pure after-the-fact delusion, created to make us feel better and calm that herd of elephants down.

However, by accepting this idea and no longer writing all my life choices down as they relate to my self-identified personality concept, I am shocked at how incredibly inconsistent I actually am. Terrified. I discover pieces of art, and music, and literature I adore so much that they make me cry with longing. But years later, I am completely indifferent. My ability to speak to other humans turns on and off by some unseen switch, with many imagined conversations ending IRL with me completely mute. Other times, I talk too much and drive people away with uncharacteristically loud, opinionated tirades. As a teen I was defiant and domineering of my (small) peer group, which morphed into epically low self esteem and a general tolerance and admiration for others, only to turn back in recent years to a disgust with 99% of human meat bags (low self esteem still intact). I decide I need to "get out there" and write intimate and exposing blog posts, only to follow it up with years of hating that anyone knows anything about me and wishing I could erase my existence from the internet.

The thing is, how do I plan for the future? How do I make decisions today in my own best interest when I don't know what that best interest is? It seems whatever I do, there are states of myself that will be unhappy with those choices later. I am trying to please a committee, and that committee is ME! I could reintroduce the idea of defined self, sure, but it would be arbitrary and only pleasing to the person who is inhabiting this form today. Besides, I would KNOW. I will always know now, that I am not me. The elephants are; the little man is just in their imagination.