A DIFFERENT ‘ME’

by Stanley

Our work isn’t like landscaping a gardening: enhancing appearances and removing the weeds – it’s more like an expedition in search of terra incognita; a different garden on the other side of the world. ‘I don’t quite know where I’m going with this’, someone might say; or, ‘If we keep going down this road I’m a bit scared of what I might become’. This can happen when someone is on the edge of new feeling, an intimation of what could be a unknown landfall. As though a completely different ‘me’ is locked away somewhere and could pop out at any moment. It can be quite scary, like someone else is lurking in the background and might take over my life.

It doesn’t take some enormous impending change of personality to give rise this kind of fright. The slightest deviation from the confines of some antique psychological habit can be enough for it to seem like the coming of the revolution: perhaps sensing the dangerous possibility of a personality reversal, so that where I have been reticent and modest, I might become boastful; where I have always deferred, I might kick up an almighty fuss; or I might start demanding all kinds of outrageous things. Worst of all, I could even be thoroughly annoying to people and not care. What hangs over all these calamitous presentiments is that if any of this got out I would suffer the most terrible consequences: surely, everyone would just abandon me.

This fear of a reversal only goes to illustrate that I have simply engineered my more socially acceptable traits. I was never really modest, never really deferential, never really undemanding, but rather I have acted as though I were. Quite clearly, engineered and acted for fear that otherwise, ‘everyone would just abandon me’ – didn’t I say ?

But of course, my secret has been well kept. So well kept that it is quite blank, until I got that fright just now. The best kept secrets are those that seem not exist. Isn’t it amazing, though, how I could have gone along all this time with that other ‘me’ living in the shadows; and what energy it must have cost me to hold him down.

Only looking back can I say this because I have since discovered that all the while he was a source of trouble, causing me at times to be quirky, but never bold, reckless but never adventurous, sentimental but never loving, funny but seldom joyful, smart but never confident. He isn’t really quirky like this, but his behaviour seeps out this way because all other avenues have been closed.

Unlike the usual ‘me’ whose character is rather too fixed, this ‘me’, this other ‘me’, is constantly changing, constantly reevaluating. That’s one reason he’s a bit scary: he’s so changeable. But really, that’s one of his great virtues. He realistically lives in a world of change.

Things like ‘meanings’ and ‘memories’ are not written in stone. They are not immutable ‘facts’. Memories, for example, are not just facts with an attitude, because attitude changes what we select as being facts. Perhaps this is not the best way of putting it; I’m not subscribing to the idea that all you have to do is change your attitude.

It’s not a question of looking at facts in a new way – because there are no immutable facts. The essence of reality is change. Hurtling down the rapids of time I have to be aware of the constantly changing configurations of the river, now rapids, now rocks, now calm, now twisting and turning through mad whirlpools and waterfalls. Alertness to the present moment and constant reevaluation is essential. I dare not be consistent for a second. Nothing is the same as it was a moment ago.

You can easily see this at work in a good session. It may appear that I am dealing with the ‘fact’ of my relationship breaking up. But as I proceed, what I am ‘dealing with’ changes. Oh! sure, I am consistently dealing with a certain area of my life, but what started out as important gradually dissolves into other considerations that seem even more important. Until finally my father, of all people, is on the scene and his part in my present problem is so crucial that he has upstaged all the other players. That’s how it feels now. Ask me again in two minutes and it’ll be different.

And with all these changes I am changing.

That’s the ‘me’ I want – the me that can keep up with the flow.