The 2 Selves / The Full Picture
Updated: Jan 6, 2024
There's at least 2 of me. We talk about there being 2 sides to a person, 2 sides to every story. But this goes much deeper than merely sides. There are 2 quite distinct, quite different people living within this frame.
There's the one you may know. He's the confident, funny, outgoing one. He can be pretty opinionated, rather loud, and is never short of a word to say. He's the one who confidently leads a team of 4 people at his work - one of them much his senior. The one who talks back to his boss, tells him when he is wrong, or when I disagree with him. The self who gets competitive at badminton, always vies for a personal best at parkrun, the self who loves to win the pub quiz - and hates to come last.
Then there's the other self. You may not have met this one, you may not know this self even exists. This is the self who will lay in bed for days on end, unwilling or incapable of getting up - except perhaps to use the toilet. This self cannot make even the most basic and seemingly simple of decisions. This self can't decide whether to make a drink or not. To take a shower or not to bother. The only decision this self is capable of making is what programme to watch next, series or film, Disney or Netflix. This self finds it extraordinarily difficult (almost impossible really) to leave the house, even to go to the shop for a pint of milk. Going to work? Impossible. Meeting a friend for a coffee? Completely unachievable. A Herculean effort, one which I am not nearly strong enough for.
For a very long time (a decade, at the very least) I have kept these 2 selves firmly apart. Like 2 magnets, repelling each other, never able to get close. I've been binary - living in 2 states of existence that cannot occur at the same time. Let's call the first self the 'on' and let's call the second self the 'off'.
The outcome of this, this binary state of being - is that people only ever see 1 side of me, only 50% of who I am. It's as if you could only ever see one half of a person - only ever seeing the back of them, and not the front. You never get the full picture. It's a bit like that game show Catchphrase - the one where the image slowly gets revealed as more of the panels are removed. Often the picture that's being built up in the mind of the observer is not a true one - it isn't showing the full story, the full person.
What if it wasn't like this? What if we presented all the sides of ourselves to each other? What if we stopped living these binary lives, and merging both of our selves into one, complete being?
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest achievement
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is a Joy to be hidden, but a Disaster not to be found
Donald Winnicott
How might that look? How might that change the conversations that we have with each other, how might we treat each other?
This is something I want to explore in the coming days, weeks, months.
Can I begin to merge the 'on' and the 'off'? Can I break down my binary system into an atomic one - one where both parts of my self can exist, simultaneously? Or even, can the 2 parts of me fuse into a single self? Is this even possible?
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