Self

experiencing, knowing and diversity

Who am I? (1986)

This was the first survey I completed in my undergraduate psychology degree. It was one page, with the one question at the top and a full A4 page of lines…at least 20 lines. 

I recall thinking it was a trick question. Who was I supposed to be answering this for? Did the person who handed me the piece of paper want me to describe them, or was it to be self-directed? Maybe it shouldn’t have, but it seemed an odd question to me. In my first 17 years of life I had never been asked that question.

We didn’t have psychology as a subject at secondary school. I was interested in human behaviour and relationships but I am bewildered where I acquired the inclination to study psychology. Based on my confusion regarding this question, it is even more puzzling.

So, maybe it wasn’t a trick question. Then what was the right answer? Should I be clever, or literal or creative? And how the hell would I fill up the whole page? How transparent should I be?

In my building anxiety, not having a clue how I should answer this otherwise seemingly innocuous, straight forward question, I started to wonder whether this tutorial space, full of strangers, was a safe place for me to share my self. Secondary school proved to be an unsafe place to be yourself, why would this institution be any different?

I recall my response went something like this…

1. Kelly

2. Daughter

3. Sister

4. Student

5. Friend

It would be total guess work if I tried to recall any more than five. I don’t imagine I wrote much more than this. I most certainly did not fill the page. I think I played it safe.

In a way, it was a trick question. I was 17 years old and had limited life experience to build a concept of self. What was 13 years of mainstream education and living in a society that valued conformity going to do for my development of self? Not to mention my awareness of self. It is little wonder that my list reflected a concept of self that was basically my name and concrete relationship roles. 

Those roles are still relevant, and now I also strongly identify with being mother. However, I also have a broader consciousness which incorporates a more integrated perspective. So I asked myself the question again.

Who am I? (2023)

1. Life

My response is very different. Does that mean that who I am has changed? Or did I not know who I was at 17? Definitely a bit of the former and a lot of the latter. My concept of self was formed predominantly in the context of how I fitted in the primary and secondary school environments and significant others who chose to spend time with me. I conscientiously observed what others found acceptable and attempted to replicate it. I watched and learned. I tried to conform throughout my primary and secondary years of schooling.

It may have been this moment when I was corralled into answering the question Who am I? that my journey of self assertion began. My analytical capacity was switched on. Instead of being an innocuous sponge, I started asking my own questions. Not about the natural world and life (that was a lifelong practice) but about the motives of others. 

My refusal to accept others attempts to pigeon hole me or assign a culturally relevant designation based on my choices, meant that I tended not to fit anywhere. 

Despite the acknowledgement of gender in the roles I listed, for me, gender is the least of the ways of knowing who I am.

The positioning of the answers in my original Who am I? list is supposed to represent significance. The earlier responses in the list being more significant than later. It would be easy to misinterpret my responses as indicating a strong female gender identity. As all my choices up to that time reflected attempts to conform to socially acceptable behaviour, any expression of identity was similarly conforming. I am a female, but I don’t have to find gender relevant to my identity, no more than I have to find any other biological characteristic or felt sense, life height or shyness as significant in identifying who I am.

If I was forced, I could elaborate on life. But I don’t like being put into a box and that seems inevitably what people will do. I remember being perplexed when someone questioned why I allowed my daughters to play with Bratz dolls. As I was an environmentalist, vegetarian, home schooling parent, it was assumed that I would object. These life choices were perceived to come along with other choices, like restricting my child’s choice of doll to encourage a particular body image or female aesthetic. In hindsight, this attitude seems to be the prelude to the cancel culture where you have to tow the party line or face expulsion. Incidentally, a few years after being questioned, one of my daughters discovered Tree Change Dolls (https://treechangedolls.tumblr.com/). She started transforming her own dolls into dolls that look a lot more like real girls. She discovered this and embraced it all on her own. This is the first doll she transformed.

More recently, I was similarly uncomfortable with a question asked in a break out room of an online peace conference. The group was asked to each share words that represent how they identify. I believe the attempt was to find similarities in the group. But the question, who or what do you identify with, is presumptuous. The intent is to categorise. In a culture where you have to confirm or you are rejected, people don’t know how to relate to you unless they know what category to put you in. Relationships are based on the categorisations. They are led to believe that how they feel about another person has to be contingent on the category they belong to. In a world that is supposed to be celebrating diversity, I would have thought we would have grown out of the inclination to categorise. But the opposite is happening.

Any group label immediately disintegrates diversity. I find all groups problematic. There is a presumption of homogeneity in a group, where in reality, the group perhaps exists for one reason only. For one shared interest or activity, characteristic or attribute. This applies to sports groups and special interest groups, classifications or identifications. It is ignorant to assume the values and behaviours of individuals based on group membership or assignment. This was never more obvious to me than when I worked in home schooling regulation. The diversity within the home schooling population in Australia is extensive. It is nothing short of presumptuous to think you know someone based on a group categorisation.

Ways of Experiencing

The way in which we experience all things, including the self, is dependent on our sensory processing and our perceptual understanding of what we are experiencing. Interoception and proprioception tell us where we are in space and give us context for our self in our internal body and with our external environment. 

Words and images shape our external experience and social relations, forming self image, labels and ways of describing the self. This can be contextual, based on time and space, specifically with changes in the social and physical environments.

We also feel things. Felt sense may be physical or emotional and can be experienced exclusively in the body as an immediate or delayed recognisable feeling. The recognition of feeling requires the transference of the experience from an exclusive felt sense to a conscious awareness or perception. This may lead to a rational knowing and/or an embodied knowing.

While various philosophies and psychologies exist, one thing that all people may agree on about self is that it is not other. The principle of life-centredness in PEACE BULL propositions reflects the understanding of the self being separate from the other and the value of each as unique experiences of life.

Ways of Knowing

Rational

We can have a rational knowing that reflects philosophy, astrology, biology and psychology. We might draw on Ayurveda, yoga, religious disciples, ancient cosmology, reductionist medicine, wholistic medicine, naturopathy, western academic psychotherapy, personality or gender theories. No matter the body of knowledge we draw an understanding or meaning from, it is all limited, not only in terms of the vastness of the truth of the universe that is difficult for anyone to grasp ever and especially in one lifetime, but also limited by the filtering through one human experience.

Some philosophical thoughts that have crossed my path in the last few weeks…..

Sartre considers the self to be all it conceives itself to be, being entirely open to choice to shape self according to our own will. Sartre gives the self complete agency.

---

Camus seems to suggest that we ought not to bother too much trying to cultivate a sense of self because of the absurdity of life, therefore the best way to live is just to be, without striving for meaning of life or the self in that life.

---

Tolstoy proposes that the self can be shaped by internal or external influence, but the former is preferable.

Each of these philosophies of self is embedded in a broader context. For Sartre there is the context of no God, for Camus life characterised by a tension of meaninglessness, and Tolstoy makes special the context of our own soul. They all presume an agency over self, not exclusively subject to uncontrollable external influence and not bound by traits present at birth. From all of them, there is a sense of freedom from the external.

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” Albert Camus

Embodied

We have the experience of living in a physical body with its cellular activity, chemical reactions, enzymic and hormonal activity and bodily system processes. Most of the time the body knows what it’s doing without our rational input (thank goodness!!). We can also have an embodied knowing. Often thought of as intuition but also the energetic residing of awareness physiologically in the body. This knowledge can influence our decision making without us being consciously aware. This embodied knowing must become conscious to be subjected to or incorporated into reasoning.

Cosmic

While I have not had direct experience of an awareness of my self within the entirety of the universe, some say it is possible. It is the ultimate intention in yoga philosophy and the purpose of yoga practices. I will call it a cosmic knowing and describe it as an awareness that transcends rational understanding of the universe or our self as a physical being and is characterised by an integrated experience of the whole. That is my rational knowing of what it might be at least.

I propose that a balanced self integrates all these ways of knowing. As few people ever experience cosmic knowing, perhaps we are all living in a separateness from our whole self.

Self as Diversity

There is no doubt that we behaviour differently in different environments and circumstances. But does that mean in reality we have more than one self? Or do we have one self that expresses itself according to place and time? My inclination is to say the latter is true. 

There is such a thing as dissociative identity disorder where two or more personalities can occupy in the one human being. I would argue that this is still the one self with multiple identities, where the self is the conglomerate of all aspects of the one individual. This means we are the accumulation of all the seconds we have lived, from the time we are born to the present day. This may explain why some people experience a regressive state, where they involuntarily identify as a child. There is more than simply a memory of being a child. There is an embodied knowing.

I believe our greatest diversity as human beings is our individuality. Labels and categorisations have implications for limiting the diversity of the individual.

The common expression being the best version of yourself suggests that we are variable elements of a whole, some elements more effective or capable of representing the self.

Self as Attachment

A fixation on one or few ways of knowing the self can be thought of as attachment which can lead to rigidity in thinking about choices. An excessive fluidity in ways of knowing the self can be thought of as detachment (as distinct from non-attachment) which can lead to a lack of stability in thinking about choices.

There is an implied peril is searching for meaning through attachment to self or detachment from self. For many, the incessant searching for meaning has a destructive quality that contrasts with the alternative of acceptance and just being. 

A poem should not mean, but be. (Archibald MacLeish, “Ars Poetica”, 106) 

In so far as our creative expression is an expression of self, this says it all. The irony of course is, that I use this quote to find meaning in not finding meaning.

Alas, the absurdity that Camus alludes to.