notes on multiple identities, or you say personae and i say ...

Elizabeth O'Connor (of Church of the Savior community in DC) once wrote a book of meditations called Our Many Selves. She provided numerous excerpts from writers reflecting on humankind's low-grade multiple identities. She was not referring to the disorder described in movies with Joanne Woodward or Sally Fields, but rather the fact that we have competing feelings, points of view, narratives, that we try to coral together, put on a cohesive smile and say, "this is me."

Of course, literature shows us over and over that being human is tricky and that we may not be what we say we are. The Bible says this over and over.

I thought about O'Connor's book, which I haven't looked at in many years, as this past week I kept seeing references to our many selves in the blog world.

1. Gary Turner, linked on the right under blog philosophy announced that he is quitting blogging. He wrote that:

In short, my blog self is not my entire self and I must say that I've been cool with that as long as both of those two selves never happen to appear together in the same room. When that happens, it shines a spotlight right on top of that partial disclosure or split identity issue and this is something I'm finding uncomfortable to reconcile.

2. There was this haunting quote from Dave Rogers (as posted by Shelley):

As authors, we're too clever by half. We seduce ourselves with the beauty of our writing, until our attention becomes focused on the words and not on the existence. This is ego. We can, and usually do, become trapped in our narratives. Our choices constrained by the character we've constructed, by the plot holes we wish to avoid, or ignore. And it's not just individuals, entire communities, countries, religions, political parties, families, any group of human beings that share a common set of beliefs and goals, all of them can become trapped in their own narratives as well. There's a lot of that going around these days.

I think it's truer to say that we're not 'writing ourselves into existence.' Rather, we're writing ourselves out of existence. We cease to be people, and instead become characters and plot devices.

3. Father Jake has a thoughtful essay on tension between his public and his private persona:

Sometimes I feel like this physical vessel I call "me" contains two different entities. The tension between them is the cause of much confusion. For the last few years, the internal chaos has been dramatically reduced. But it is still there.

I've finally found myself at the point in life where I can more objectively observe this tension. It is questionable how objective such observations actually are, of course. Finite humans are doomed to be always bound by the limitations of subjectivity. The thing observed is our perception of it, not the thing as it actually is.