Awareness
Sometimes I experience strange flashes of self-awareness for which I have no name. They usually happen on days that are solitary but emotionally neutral, in the wake of moments of accidental mental calmness. They last for a few seconds, then fade away, leaving me wondering what they were.
They’re not profound or scary, these flashes, just odd and acute, typically beginning with the thought, “There’s me... again.” It would then dawn on me, on a gut level, sometimes uncomfortably, that despite having just felt calm, content, or whatever, I’m still me. I’ve always been and will always be me.
I could travel the world, fall in and out of love many times over, adopt new causes and beliefs, heal my traumas and collect new ones, live the proverbial thousand lives, and that’s all they’re going to be at the end of the day, proverbial, because I will still be living in this head.
Out of all the limitations of living in a physical universe, being confined in one’s own head, feels to me, during those strange flashes, like the most restrictive. Because no amount of material change in the world around me, or in myself–a part of the world–will change the fact that I will experience those changes as me. I don’t get to be anybody else. Ever. And during those flashes, I don’t have this latter thought in dismay or self-hatred. I’m not disappointed that I’m me and not someone else; I’m just amazed that I’ve been in this one head all along. All of what’s happened to me, every experience, and it’s just the one guy that I got to be.
That we’re destined to experience life this way, and only this way, feels like the worst of several possible outcomes. And this is a reality which I cannot think my way out of, by design. No amount of will power, no “law of attraction,” nor any kind of ideological gymnastics will change it.
The surest way of partly escaping this reality (apart from psychiatric, psychedelic, or mystic depersonalization) is, in my opinion, the immersion in someone else’s art. Literary fiction, to give an example, works for this because of the pretense that what you’re reading is fake, a fabrication. I say it’s pretense because good art and fiction are very real in the ways that matter.
And this is why it works so well. It’s not so much the standard “suspension of disbelief,” which is what your mind does to immerse itself in plot, characters, and the fictional world’s logic, but the sense of being inadvertently immersed in the cognitive, moral, and emotional universe of the art’s creator. If you’re immersed in the deep brain processes of someone else, you have lost a part of yourself. (And the pretense of fiction, compared to non-fictive art, makes the process feel undidactic, which is a great deception, because it very much is didactic, in that you’re being covertly instructed on how to be this author or artist.)
It’s like being in someone’s shoes, but in a much more significant way than what that idiom normally implies (actively imagining having that person’s circumstances). It’s as if the artist squeezed out of their own skin through a pin-sized hole on the top of their head (so that no one will notice) and let you step into it.