ABSTRACT
One week into the second term and a class discussion, the lecturer poses a question: “Is there such a thing as a self?”. The discussion gets underway, we consider “yes”, we do have a self, but we have different opinions about where it can be found. We laugh. It’s funny. The very word “itself” is set in our language: himself, herself, myself, but we were unsure of where to locate it and how to describe it. I think fondly of my little story about the two selves, and realise with a jolt that I didn’t used to have a self, myself, but now I do. All of a sudden, it’s perfectly clear. Once I had nothing but space inside, an emptiness that was quite unrelated to loneliness. Events in the outside world went straight to my head, no stopping along the way to be looked at, considered, weighed up, or rejected. Now, it was as if I had a whole other person inside of me, someone who listened, advised, was always kind, and, most importantly, always “there”.
