a chronicle of awareness
the unfortunate incident of the self in the nighttime
lately i have (re)discovered that i resemble nothing so much in this world as a russian nesting doll.
i am backpacking alone, just me and my carry-on suitcase and my sadness, but i am never without company because of the russian doll effect: i can never go anywhere, it seems, without the totality of my selves coming along for the ride.
i have an astonishing number of selves, a number i am worried that if i tally it up and present it to the public i will be cast out as the greediest, most selfish self-collector of all time. i can imagine it already: “why do you have so many selves? why do you need that many?”
it may be i’m a hoarder, or a capitalist, in the russian nesting doll universe i write this from. one is mental, medical, compulsive, a thing to be interventioned and dissected and therapized until, gradually, i am able to give away some of the selves without being reduced to panic at the fear of being without. the other is cold, calculated, an issue of resource allocation rather than brain chemistry: i collect because i can. i collect because i have the means to. i collect so that i will have, even if it means that you will have not.
why keep a collection?
the late ursula k le guin suggested that collecting is one of, if not the, most fundamentally human actions that we can take. in fact, she proposes, it was probably collection that led to the birth of our first tool, the bag. having a satchel with which to put the potatoes you dug up from the dirt is an infinitely useful thing. we collect because we have to, because we have no pouch, and hungry children, and not enough time to go back and forth between the cave and the potato patch; we collect as a means of survival, a way of bridging the gap between a life of merely scraping by and a life rendered slightly easier, or perhaps more beautiful, with the help of a few potatoes, a fishhook, a blanket under which to pass the dead of night.
a skeleton full of closets, or a suitcase that you had to pack with everything you thought you’d need for six months, or the basement piled precariously with the cardboard boxes that constitute the skin of the body of your life: everything is spilling over, everything is shoved inside or aside, everything worries me with its hugeness or its non hugeness. i have a fear of winter, i have a fear of starving, i have a fear of looking badly. i stuff my suitcase with everything i think i can fit in it and then every single day i stare at my clothes like they are a language i do not read. i know they are mine, know i am the one who packed them, that i put them on my body, together and apart in various combinations, but they mean nothing to me. they are foreign, strange, not real; and every day i panic at how far away from everything i know i am. i want my closet, everything thrifted, a seemingly infinite number of ways to assemble the self. i want my pantry, my bulk grains and my dried beans and a spice collection that rivals that of a medieval king’s. i want my bathroom, the essential oils stuffed under the sink, the random hand lotions and gadgets and gizmos that one inadvertently draws into their gravitational pull. i don’t know what i would use if i was there — some strange hair product? a face mask? i don’t know — but i miss having the option to use things without thinking of how little i have. down the street there’s a safeway, and a cvs, and a sephora, and a little bit away there’s a lush, and an ulta, and everywhere else i’d ever need to go for these things. here i can only have what i can carry. here i have no paycheck every friday with which to whittle away the pennies on the sorts of frivolous things you don’t think twice of. you want it, you need it, you get it. americanism 101.
having a home means having a place to keep your stuff. you do not have to lock everything up, at least not from the other people inside the house. you do not constantly have to go up and down the stairs to your room to put one thing away and come back with another. home means you have a place for what you have. a specific place, a real place, not just the bottomless hole of an overstuffed suitcase. the soap goes in the dish; the earrings go on the earring rack. the scarf goes into the woven basket with all the other scarves.
but here i only have the hole.
precisely because i do not have what i had back home, i have found myself with something new. this new thing is much less exciting than a thrifted t-shirt, or another pair of sweatpants, both of which i desperately want but, at present, cannot have. no. this new thing is a new self. and this new self does not like me.
i do not know why this self, whom we will nickname gretchen, has decided she hates me so. (she is a she, even though i am a they; such are the workings of an inner life. my meanest, most bitter parts are always like this, a horror movie montage of a high school mean girl.)
why she hates me, i don’t know. all i know for sure is that she is serious about her hatred.
probably gretchen has been with me my whole life. probably some core part of myself is tangled up in her, and vice versa. probably she has been silently commenting on everything i’ve done for years.
but without the barricade of stuff — without the castle walls made of trips to the thrift store in arvada, the moat of honey and saffron and vegan yoghurt in the fridge, the knights of shining armor and stacks of quilts and abundant sheaths of paper — without everything that i interact with daily in my regular, non-backpacking life, gretchen has suddenly become visible.
gretchen hates when i sleep late. she hates when i get to a museum and i have second thoughts about what i want to be doing at the museum. she hates when i get hungry, or when i have to cook for myself, or anytime a decision must be made between labor (mine) and money (also mine). she doesn’t believe me when i tell myself in bouts of loneliness that it will get better. she doesn’t want it to get better. why should she? she is powerful precisely because i am alone. what fortifications could better bring to me that she would not want to cut through with a sword?
she hates me when i wake up, disgustingly, stupidly, droolingly. i am disgusting and stupid and drooling and she cannot wait to tell me just how much so i am. i am doing everything wrong. i am not fit for human interaction. i am not fit for human life.
gretchen hates me and so i hate myself, since gretchen is me and i am gretchen and we are all stuck in this wheel together.
what a horrible way to find out you’re not who you really are. what a horrible way to discover you are not as integrated as you thought.
what do you do with a gretchen?
she is very loud, and very persistent, and if i wrest control back from her for a day or two at a time, she will quickly sweep back in and shove me, quite without remorse, straight off the cliff. who cares if i bash my head in on the way down? not gretchen.
i knew i probably had a gretchen, that bottom-of-the-barrel self who has no redeeming qualities, that hateful little voice that i squash like a seed in the dirt — please let me reborn beautiful, please let me turn this splitting into something better. everyone has a gretchen. i just didn’t think mine would be this bad.
if i had had to choose a companion self for this trip, i would have chosen someone else. lark, maybe, who always has their camera, and a story to charm a stranger; or tilly, one of my rarest selves, who only comes out in the middle of the night, never on time or when you expect her, but every few months nonetheless. i would have taken someone i haven’t met yet, had in fact been wishing that i would meet a new self and be infatuated with them. that was the hope, after all, the secret core of the apple that eve bit into: that you will run into yourself somewhere, and you would know who you were. i wanted to be surprised by myself. i wanted to learn i was brave, or funny, or magnanimous. i thought i would meet myself in any of the places where one meets a self: a train, or the museum, or the park at sunset. i thought i would be clever. i thought i would be kind. i thought i would feel good.
instead i have found only gretchen. and even though we have fought, and i have told her to leave, and she has told me to go to hell — even though we do this every night, every morning, she comes back to find me, like a ghost, or a friend.
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