ABSTRACT
The project of the self is central to the way we live our lives from infancy to death – psychologically, biologically, socially and geographically. Who am I? What am I? How do I fit in to the world? Whom do I know, love and trust? And where do I come from and where am I heading? These questions demand answers but rarely are we able to be completely clear and emotionally comfortable with the ones that are available. Human beings are complex and who and what we really are is never one-dimensional. We are layered and from those layers spring feelings and actions that are good and bad, loving and envious, generous and mean. It is an exceptional person who is not troubled by these pressures on the self and desire to prioritize the good, the lovable and the memorable characteristics. Perhaps because of this we censor our thoughts. Rather like George H. Mead’s idea of the I/Me – the purely subjective experience and the objective, observed self; we actively construct our presentation to the world as well as to our self (Mead, 2009). As I suggested in the Introduction we post photographs, ‘selfies’, we have chosen to represent who we think we are and want to be recognized as, on social media to gain feedback on how others perceive us. As with the selfie, we tell our stories to our self first, and our social networks after. As time passes and we develop and age the stories get more complex, comprising increasing amounts of material. The more we investigate our ‘pre-histories’ through explorations of family trees, it follows that the narrative curls itself around what we already thought we understood and information about people, places and collective social histories insinuates itself into our identity. Throughout this book, as with any (quasi)academic project, I have been consciously and unconsciously selective about the networks I picked out and constructed, and the stories I prioritized.
