I have been wracking my brain for an appropriately critical blog post to act as a sort of initiation rite after New Writing South generously offered to include me on their Good Blog Guide (yay me), and have found myself unable to think of anything beyond paraphrasing existing critical work. I have, however, been somewhat more prolific in creative writing instead (one poem and a piece of flash fiction counts as more prolific to someone who has written nothing since being required to for a uni module), and in the wake of some pretty rough anxiety I’ve been having something of an identity crisis, so I thought I’d write about that. As a result, this post is likely to be a bit more emotional than it is critical, but hey, variety is the spice of life, as they say.
In personal memory I have never felt as though I had a particularly strong identity (although my mum tells me that when I was too young to remember I was over-confident and very headstrong. Oh how the mighty have fallen), and have always felt that other people seem to have something of a more fixed identity, or at least a few unwavering characteristics which they cling to that make them feel like them. I however, always felt sort of half-baked, with no real fixed set of identity traits; that I was a sort of freakish amalgamation of all the people I’ve ever known. My interests change dramatically depending on who my friends are at any given time, which makes it difficult to form a coherent idea about who I am as a person. For example, I never seem to be able to make a decision about what to do when in a group of friends, I just do what they do; when I had a friend who was a church-goer, I got baptised; when friends drink and smoke, I drink and smoke; and two friends I currently have are into varying degrees of metal, which has encouraged me to listen to the things they listen to, things I had previously had little experience of. Of course, these are things that happen to everyone, and don’t sound so out of the ordinary; to a certain degree everyone is influenced by the people who touch their lives, and everyone changes from one day to the next. Still, the notion that I am an empty vessel, waiting to be filled by other people’s tastes and mannerisms and speech fills me with an anxiety I am unprepared to deal with, an anxiety that peaks in moments of solitude, and which makes me feel like there isn’t really a ‘me’ at all, except when other people are involved. It makes me wonder about the nature of subjectivity, the construction of the conscious and unconscious lives we live, and where all this personality stuff comes from in the first place. This is also why Lacanian psychoanalysis appeals to me, as it explores the notion of the void of subjectivity, the idea that the subject is in essence an emptiness, a lack, which often begs the question, ‘if all subjects are a void, and if we are all subjects, then where does the plethora of characteristics with which we describe ourselves come from?’. It is a question not dissimilar to the physicists problem of the beginning of the universe, or the debate that surrounds the question of the nature of a text in literary theory; it plays with the idea that something can arise from nothing, that too much nothing (less than nothing), an excess of nothing, can be the birthing place of something.
Everyone (I hope) to some extent looks at those around them and thinks others’ lives are better than their own, that other people have a better sense of self, are happier, more confident, more fulfilled. This is, I think, a matter of perspective. As many a poet and songwriter has expressed, we can never see beneath the surface appearance of others, and so in many ways the feeling of incompleteness can be attributed to the gap between what is seen and what is felt. This is what Lacan describes as the mirror stage (which marks the entry point into the symbolic order, the ‘fall from grace’ if you will), the phase in which young children see themselves in a reflective surface, either a mirror or another individual, perhaps the mother, and the illusion of completeness presented by the body is at odds with the experience of gazing from inside one’s own head. The myriad thoughts and feelings therein (especially the painful ones) do not seem to be visible, or feel too sublime to be contained within such a small physical space. Thus the subject is split, decentred (with a little help from other psychoanalytic processes such as foreclosure and castration), unrecognisable to itself. Emily Dickinson put it rather succinctly some years before Lacan when she said,
And Something’s odd – within –
The person that I was –
And this One – do not feel the same –
Could it be Madness – this?(poem 410)
which on a side note is why I think it’s criminal that she hasn’t been counted amongst contemporary thinkers, and the lack of critical material about her work astounds me.
Thinking back to my personal experience, the upshot of this dilemma, and constant puzzling over who I am and trying to figure out that ‘unfathomable x’ that makes me ‘me’, is that I seem to exist in a constant state of anxiety, forever teetering on an unknowable precipice, unable to look anywhere, least of all inside myself (if such a place exists). It feels like being blind, like constantly circling some kind of traumatic kernel of infinite nothingness, and knowing that if only I could find the light switch, everything would be ok. The silence of solitude is deafening. There is an incessant roar of a thousand voices in my head, none of which feel like my own, but all of which feel unique to me, and I am unable to shake any one of them free. If I could only untangle the giant knot I feel like I carry within myself all the time I could think, I could exist, but trying to grasp any one thread only forces them tighter together.
This post hasn’t been up to my usual critical standard, but I hope that if you’re reading this, and any of it sounds familiar, you’ll know that it’s going to be alright. You’ll know that you’re not alone.
psychoanal 