Concerning My Self

September 17th, 2024

Currently Reading: The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston

Currently Watching: Gravity Falls (again)

Currently Listening: Fight the Real Terror by My Brightest Diamond

The brain is a crazy organ. All of our 'self' is generated there. Which seems insane to me. How can one organ be responsible for a job so big?

In a very unscientific way, I don't believe it can. Look, I haven't done any research on this. I'm just a person with a blog. But let me share with you my very unscientific and unresearched position on what it means to be a human self:

You are a physical being.

Okay, like, no duh, but also yeah. So much of daily life in suburbia is cerebral. Even in writing this I use very few physical hand movements. I am basically motionless at my computer and alternate between looking at my laptop at arms length and looking at my phone at arms length. I could spend the entire day in one spot. Thinking. Philosophizing. Daydreaming.

When we talk about the 'self' we talk about our ideas and opinions or our personality--our likes and dislikes and fears and joys--but the physical body also contains the self. I am an able-bodied person discovering at 30 what, more than likely, disabled people discovered at the onset of their disability: you are also your physical body.

By which I mean the physical can shape the mental or the mental the physical. If I were Deaf, for example, my sense of self would still be shaped by how I experience the world around me. If I were a wheelchair user or had a chronic illness, my physical body would not limit my experiences, but change them. The functioning of my body would contribute to my identity. So why, as an able-bodied human do I find it hard to connect my mind-body experiences?

Earlier this year I read Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder where our main character, Mother, transforms into Nightbitch: the messy, grunting, sweaty mass of a domesticated dog. Women are often ideas. Which archetype will you be to him tonight, ladies? Madonna or Whore? Nightbitch reminds us that Mother is a mammal. She is physical. I find it interesting that Nightbitch isn't a werewolf, but a dog. She is both wild and domesticated simultaneously. She is not a Jekyll and Hyde dichotomy.

Our survival as a species relies on the physical body: hunting, gathering, migrating, and love-making. But not every member of our society could do all those things. Thus, we had community. Community now feels exclusively cerebral. Your friends hold space for you to work through your feelings surrounding a problem.

Sure. That's important. But will they help you move? Will they share a meal with you? Will they touch you? Can you hear their voice regularly or must you imagine their voice from text? Where's the physicality in friendship? Where is the communal self?

My 'self' is not confined to my ideas. Those who only know me by this blog cannot ever possibly know me just as I could not ever possibly know Chappell Roan by watching her VMAs performance over and over and over and over again. You can get an idea of my self, but unless you have touched my skin, heard my voice, broke bread with me, you only know a piece of me.

Sharing your self is an intimate act. We enter this world naked, only to be touched and warmed by life. To think at some point we stop accepting the hands of others on our bare skin. Our fingerprints starved for connection tap only on glass with little to no feedback. We are sustained by ideas of people, yet starved for real connection to body and mind.

I thus ask you for a meal together. Really together. Call me.

--Beacon