ABSTRACT
When putting their memories into words, the persons writing the letters sometimes clearly indicate that their sudden self-awareness made them feel removed from others, whether or not they were physically present near them. A writer and publicist aged 48 noted:
“I am seven years old. I left school a bit earlier. The teacher had sent me to my closest friend, Tilly. She lived a small distance away from the village in a farm among the pastures. She had stayed home today because she was not feeling well. I had often walked this road before, but never without Tilly. It is around 2 o’clock, and there is an oppressive heat and complete silence. A few birds are sitting on the barbed wire. The sandy road has deep cracks and I try not to trip over the rocks. My stockings have sagged, just like the suspenders of my green checkered skirt. The school is far behind me, a small dot on the horizon. Just as far before me I can see the low roof of Tilly’s farm. I stand still to look at a plane leaving a line in the air. I track it with my finger. And that is when it happens. With all intensity, I realize that I am ‘I’. Not my parents. Not Tilly. I. I exist. Here and now. I wake up in my own life, in which I am the protagonist. It is an overwhelming experience. I have passed a threshold. I abruptly come home in myself. How long I have been standing there on that sandy road below the burning sun with my new insight, I cannot remember. Nor how the rest of the afternoon went. I do know that I 26did not tell it to anyone. I had initially forgotten it but reading your book ‘I am I’ made me remember it again.”
‘I am not Tilly, not my parents’. They are the others. The child separates itself from those others. This is described beautifully by a middle-aged psychologist and publicist:“I was seven years old and staying at my grandmother’s home for a few days. It was an enormous house…. I was staying there and remember wandering around the ground floor, from the dining room through the office to the conservatory, from the seating area to an extension with green velvet furniture nobody ever used, when I was suddenly struck by the thought ‘I am I’. This is why this was so remarkable, because I immediately realized that this was the first time in my life I had thought that. It was like I had not existed before this moment. It was a moment of great clarity. I was no longer one with myself, but observed myself from up above, as it were. The realization that I was the only one who could think about myself as ‘I’ was new and strange.
Afterwards, I was able to explain why this thought struck me right there and then. I was a shy child and had not stayed over anywhere before. No matter how nice everyone in my grandmother’s home was to me, it was not like home. In your own home, everything is self-evident; your family members are almost an extension of yourself. When I was staying over, this mindless self-evidence disappeared. The distinction between myself and other people struck me intensely and I became aware of myself.”
Looking at yourself ‘from up above’, as it were, is so common that I have written a separate chapter on it. But I have not often encountered this levelheaded and plausible explanation why the I-am-I experience occurred precisely at that time. The reason in this situation seems to be the interrupted symbiotic relationship with one’s own household, where the ‘family members are almost an extension of yourself’.