SELFIE

OCTOBER 10, 2024 – If I’m anything like the next person, there’s reason to worry about the next person. All my life I’ve continually tried to step outside myself, my quirks and confines, thoughts and ideas, idiosyncrasies and eccentricities, mostly to turn back and see how I come across to myself. This is a challenging exercise, given my natural biases and experiential and hereditary filters and ingrained points of reference. Two revealing tools for self-assessment are audio and video devices, of course, but over time I’ve found that the most revelatory reflections appear in what I’ve written and long forgotten.

Over the past several years, to reduce our future dumpster space requirements I’ve been chipping away at—id est, pulling out, reading, tossing, saving, and sorta organizing—old letters, papers and journals. Excepted from this effort are my blog posts, which are still too recent. The older material is far more interesting—for two reasons.

First, the old stuff provides a perspective enriched by time and experience. My writing reflected reactions to life, people and circumstances that I encountered in the early or middle part of the story. Time combined with experience forced inevitable changes in reference points—personal and public—and altered my attitudes and opinions. Drafts of letters I scribbled out decades ago, for example, in which I carried on something fierce about one subject or another, were often cringe-worthy, sometimes surprising, and rarely boring. In many respects they were better reflections of self than audio or video recordings would have been (such were a rarity back then), since writing requires deeper cognitive effort than speaking does. In my relative youth I managed to cultivate a huge volume of thoughts on paper, leaving for my old self ample material for self-assessment and re-assessment. All the old writing forms a kind of personal archaeological record, a baseline for understanding my intellectual, psychological, even emotional evolution.

The second reason all that ancient writing is more compelling than recent writing is that old frames of reference provide a useful gauge for evaluating aspects of contemporary life that I take for granted. Much of this pertains to basic communication, which has such a huge impact on how we relate to one another and even to ourselves. Who today sits down on a regular basis and pens a long letter to a friend or family member, digging deep and expressing expansively, feelings, arguments, and opinions—and responding to the same that are penned to us? Moreover, by reflecting on the figurative bugs in the fossilized amber of my old journals, I’m often forced to question whether my current (immutable) views are also bugs mired in hardening resin.

I know, however, that try as I might, I’ll never see myself whole independently of . . . myself. I’ll always have myself in tow, and despite the tools at my disposal—including the contrasts between my old writing and my current outlook—I cannot disinherit myself from myself or write my way out of long-trod attitudinal ruts.

Subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

© 2024 by Eric Nilsson