DRMacIver's Notebook
Threads of existence
Threads of existence
I have a sort of running “joke” that I don’t have chronic fatigue, I’m just… fatigued… chronically. Same with pain. Similarly I’m not disabled, it’s just that sometimes I can’t walk.
Anyway, I don’t have depersonalisation…
Someone on discord recently described my writing as:
this guy has actually thought about the most basic mechanics of “being a person in the world”
One of the reasons I have to do that is that I don’t feel very good at being a person, and I’m having to figure it out the hard way.
I genuinely don’t think I actually meet many (any?) of the diagnostic criteria for depersonalisation, but there’s definitely some sort of background feeling of… what would it like to actually just effortlessly be a person?
To be clear, I’m not actually under any illusions about whether I am or am not a person, and don’t actually benefit from external reassurances about this. I’m factually clear on the empirical question of my personhood. But it doesn’t feel like I’m very good at it, and I don’t trust external observers’ opinions on the subject.
The reason I don’t trust external observers here is that I think people rarely notice this about me, because I’m highly functional in short bursts and in company, and so this adds up to seeming extremely like a person in any externally observable scenario. But what that feels like from the inside is that I cohere when observed or otherwise prompted to by circumstances, but can’t easily do so under my own steam, and by default just collapse into a sort of decohered blob that left to its own devices will just drift.If you’re wondering if that’s related to the aforementioned definitely-don’t-have-chronic-fatigue, yeah me too. I don’t know how much, or in which direction, but it sure seems like a thing. If you’re thinking “gosh David, it sure sounds like what you’re describing is depression”, yes I know. I did start by talking about a key major common diagnostic feature of depression after all…
It feels, almost, like having a self that lacks object permanence. It’s not there if someone isn’t looking. And, sure, it’s relatively stable in its characteristics each fresh time it exists, because it’s made out of roughly the same parts each time, but it still went through a phase of not existing and coming back into existence, with a discontinuity between those two things.
Anyway, this seems bad, and I’d like to fix it. In some ways, fixing it is probably a core feature of my project, although I don’t know that I’ve done a very good job of that.I tend to think of my personal project as something more like “Figure out how to be less depressed”, but it has a lot of details and pulls in a lot of life in general
Part of fixing it is just finding more circumstances in which I can cohere, but I think another bigger part is a sort of… OK, sometimes you’re not a person. That’s normal. Going to sleep for example is a legitimate interruption in continuity. Or sometimes you just lose yourself in flow in a way that interrupts your conscious awareness of what’s going on, or get drunk, or are ill, or… You get the idea. If an enduring sense of self requires full continuity, you’re never going to have it.
I think the analogy to object permanence is interesting, because the thing about lacking object permanence is that objects actually are permanent. The fact that they cease to exist for you in between viewings doesn’t actually mean they cease to exist. What’s lacking is not a permanence to their existence, but your sense of that permanence as a unified thing.
I think part of how you build that unity between different fragments of yourself across time is that you start to build links between them. Part of what’s interesting about the attitude to commitments I’m trying to foster is that it is casting a link forward in the future between yourself now and who you will be. Being able to do this reliably starts to help you feel that you will continue to exist in the future as an entity contiguous with who you are now. You are, but actually being able to act on that helps you alieve that.
I think telling stories about your life is likely the other part of this link, and it’s part of why I’m trying to figure out how to explore that. In much the same ways commitments cast a link forward, a story casts a link backwards, connecting up who you are now with who you were then.
Alasdair MacIntyre has this notion of “narrative identity” as the thing that constitutes selfhood. I haven’t read much about this, though I do keep vaguely intending to. I guess I’m gesturing at something like that, although I’m not sure we’re talking about exactly the same sort of thing. I don’t think you can view self as wholly constituted by narrative, but I do think that narrative is perhaps an important tool for building a skeleton that a self can grow on top of.