On Feeling Oneself Think! (Freewrite)

I feel an oscillation between a feeling of authenticity and one of emptiness. It is hard to know where I end and where everything else begins. It is hard to know whether the things I think I want are the things I want or whether there is an outside force brainwashing me. How do we separate the internal from the external world?

Sometimes after spending a few hours in my own head, in a room without mirrors or windows, I become formless and immaterial. Then when I step out of the room and see my own reflection, my body and face, my external and outward facing self, I feel shocked for a second. Seeing my physical self is shocking because my main conscious experience lies internally. To myself I am a collection of thoughts and memories, and sometimes I forget that all of this "self" resides in the petite freckled body of someone named Emily Wunsch. Sometimes it seems our inward and outward face have nothing to do with one another, or at least this is how I experience myself. I guess some people try to express their inner selves through their outward appearances. Just today I passed a guy decked head to toe in marijuana leaves: hat, shirt, sunglasses, shorts, sandals. I guess everyone reveals something about themselves by how they look, but is hard to know how much or whether anything we think we know about a person by simply looking at them is true.

This gets at the gap between what we can observe and what we can know, which is a central point of tension that drives much of my writing. It encompasses the delicate relationship between the material and immaterial dimensions of the self, between the seen and the unseen.

Writing can make the immaterial into material. Thoughts to words on a page. Writing is the medium that allows us to come closest to consciousness. I am interested in authors who explicitly treat their work as representations of how they see the world, and reflect on the relationships between the act of living and the act of writing. This is why I have been reading contemporary work that thinks beyond recognizable narrative structures such as plot, character development, etc. These traditional structures can trick us into thinking that these are the ways we must view our own lives. That we must grow and progress through our lives in recognizable ways, that there are set ways of doing things. Stories are the main way we understand ourselves (i.e. "I was an only child for the first three years of my life and, since the birth of my younger brother, I have never felt like I have gotten enough attention. This is why I have decided to become a writer.")

In an interview I heard, the host mentioned that Rachel Cusk (one of my favorite authors these days) does not create characters that show “growth”, because she does not experience “growth” in her life. Instead, she creates characters that are composed of “iconic utterances.” In her Outline trilogy, the narrator does not have a defined self, she acts as a filter for other people. These three novels are mostly composed of monologues heard and recounted by the almost invisible narrator.

I am excited by the possibility of using writing to observe how I live. About experimenting with how I can represent my gaze onto the world through the medium.

As I sit here at the library writing this, it ocurrs to me that love observing people around me and knowing that they too have a consciousness. Duh..but still! This simple fact never ceases to amaze me. The consciousness of other people feels like an endless well of creative possibility.

I keep circling around the ways that fiction connects us to one another so intimately. To be able to come so close to someone else’s consciousness! To their inner experience and understanding! To be able to take on their gaze of the world for just a minute when under that sweet fictive spell!

Also, knowing that all I can know with some certainty is my own consciousness is another endless well for me, albeit one that sometimes fills me with existential terror. My consciousness is my whole world, therefore, by thinking of myself in new ways and taking on new ideas for how to live, I can change my whole existence.

If someone were to ask me today, “So what do you do for a living?”, the only true answer I could give at this point is “I have been dedicating myself to learning about the possibilities of living” (I start waitressing on Thursday, hehe). I am trying to separate my art making from my money making. The pressure of making everything you care about into a career can be so limiting and can lead to creative blocks. As I read all the cool philosophy and literature I didn’t get the chance to read in college and take in all these new exciting ideas, my anxious brain will interject and say “how can you make this into a career?” It is this thought that blocks my ability to feel the joy that is the freedom to think and create! It is so freeing to know that there is not one best way of living and that I can create a system of meaning that is true to me.

It is at this point, when I am feeling authentic and full of excitement for life, where I stop and again wonder whether I am being brainwashed. Whether this thing that feels so true to me right now is coming from someone else. Who am I even speaking to?? Everyone and no one, I might say. Or am I speaking to my lover, using his thoughts and language. But how could all these thoughts be untrue when they are the thoughts that are most basic to existence? Sometimes I feel I love somebody so much that I take on their thoughts as my own, and then I fear that once we break up, I will be left empty and my life will be void of meaning. This is a central fear of mine. But I am working to untangle it. Of course loving someone will change me, as I will change them. But their influence is not absolute, I have the agency to shape it in a way that is meaningful to me. The person’s influence on me does not have to end if the love were to end. The parts of them that move me now will continue to move me in their absence. Everything is part of everything else, which means no one part belongs to solely to another person. Don’t let the fear of losing someone become the fear of losing yourself.

I am going to hit "publish" now because my new thing is letting go of the writing before it takes on weight.