Jousting With Our Past Selves

I spend a lot of time thinking about identity. My own identity, certainly, but also cultural identity. Last night, my mom asked me why I didn’t think of myself as physically attractive. We were watching Entourage on HBO, and Mandy Moore was on, and Mom said, “isn’t that that actress everyone thinks you look like,” and I said, “yeah, but like a cute version of me.”

Anyway.

I explained that I believe on an intellectual level that I am attractive, but that on a subconscious level I am now, and will forever be, the girl nobody wanted to dance with in junior high. I was the girl who begged the football player to go to the dance, and I was the girl he stood up. I was the girl with lots of “guy friends” but no “boyfriends.” And, I was the girl that even the nerds wouldn’t touch. Ten years later, my body having escaped the vicious, oily throes of puberty, I still feel exactly the same. The image of myself that I formed then is still the image of myself that I hold now, even though photographs of me tell a different story. I began to wonder how many of us are still grappling with these outdated images of ourselves. Like Don Quixote, are we all jousting with the specters of our past selves?

In one of my favorite movies, Waking Life, one of the scenes discusses the problem of retaining a continuous sense of an identity in an incessantly changing and evolving body. The characters in the film explain that in order to connect the person you are today with the images you are shown of yourself as a child, you have to invent a story that explains what happened to that child to cause it to become you. This narrative, essentially, is a fiction – the fiction of our lives. Sartre says, “nous sommes condamnés d’être libres,” that we are ultimately forced to create our own self-definitions, and moreover, that we do so without always realizing it. What are these moments that force us to change our self-definitions? And, when those around us no longer perceive us as they once did, if we go from being treated as ugly to then treated as beautiful, why do we not change our self-definitions? How can we and why do we change or not change the fictions of our lives?

These narratives remind me of an article I just read on Oriononline.org called “Telling Stories” by Kelpie Wilson. Wilson argues, not unlike many scholars (Bill Moyers comes to mind here), that we need myths or legends to understand the world around us, and more importantly, to understand our proper role in relationship to humanity and the world. In particular, Wilson is referring to the story of Noah and the Flood in contrast to contemporary reactions to Hurricane Katrina. Wilson argues that in both cases, human beings were culpable, though surely more culpable today than in biblical times since in Noah’s day it was only the abstract problem of human immorality, the “noise” of the Babylonians, and not the CFCs and other ozone depleting gases that are causing global warming and exacerbating tropical storms. Nearly every culture has a story of the great flood in which the moral of the story is never to incur the wrath of God, but so far nobody has come up with a way to explain Hurricane Katrina or the dozens of other natural disasters suddenly affecting the planet as a result of human failure. Despite the fact that a majority of the members of the scientific community assert that global warming not only exists but is a direct result of pollution caused by human beings, the Bush administration still proudly refuses to even considering restraining greenhouse gas emissions or deigning to sign the Kyoto treaty. It seems that to everyone but ourselves, we are the cause of our own self-destruction. What will it take to make us change our own self-definitions and take responsibility for the affect we have on the planet? How can we create a fiction like Noah’s legend of the flood to make ourselves aware of who we really are and what we are really doing?

Isn’t it interesting that we need fiction in order to awaken to our self-awareness?