Selves essay (re-uploaded)

A Short Story Of A Long Journey | A Journey Towards Self-Awareness.

The reason it’s so hard to communicate with my other selves is that even though many of my selves are aware of each other, and we willingly share our thoughts, experiences, and memories together, looking at another self’s memory is much more difficult, almost like it’s blurry and faded.

Remembering a memory that was originally experienced by yourself appears closer to a video that I can rewind/ff/pause at will. However, trying to remember another self’s memory is a lot less complete. It doesn’t look like a video, but rather flashes of color, and maybe a picture that appears for only a moment if I’m lucky. It’s not really remembering the fine details of the experience, but rather a vague representation of feelings somehow related to the memory.

Because of this, I can’t really talk to my selves in words. Even if I find the perfect words to explain what’s going on, they’re too fine of a detail to be seen while going through another self’s memory. If I focus incredibly hard when forming a memory intended for my other selves, then I can attach a word or phrase to a memory, but then I have to hope that they can figure out the rest based on what they know about us, and trust they understand how the feelings attached to the memory relate to the the phrase.

As you can guess, it’s not uncommon to misinterpret the feelings, or just not comprehend them at all. It’s not a problem with simple memories that have simple feelings (like remembering what you ate for lunch: the memory is a food item, and the feeling is a simple good/bad/average choice).

It took a lot of practice and a lot of trial and error to learn how to communicate with my other selves. It was especially difficult in the beginning when we didn’t know each other existed. We didn’t know where some feelings were coming from, and often contradictory feelings made it difficult to reconcile with myself, and so I never understood what I was feeling, which made me not know what I actually wanted. However, the process of becoming self aware is that much more difficult.

A natural consequence of having multiple selves that are capable of forming unique thoughts and feelings is that when we began becoming self aware, there had to be a point where only one of us was truly self aware. Even though he knew others existed, he had no real idea how to reach out to the others.

When we’re raised to think that hearing voices in our head is bad, direct communication becomes more of a hindrance than a benefit. Since we’re told it’s crazy to hear voices, and being crazy is bad, then when if you do directly talk to another self, they’ll often assume that they came up with it if they agree with it, or convince themselves that nothing was ever actually heard.

Let me tell you, learning how to speak a language with someone who can’t even comprehend your existence is very difficult. It’s especially frustrating when all you want to do is explore this new self-awareness, but you feel the obligation to help all the others along the way before I can. The selfless reason is that if I hadn’t been the first one to become self-aware, then I would have wanted someone to help me as quickly as possible. The slightly selfish reason is that even though I know exploring self awareness for the sake of exploring it would be fun and fulfilling, if I really want to get the most of my self awareness, we all have to work together, and it’s pretty hard to work with someone you can’t understand.

After years of trying, and lots and lots of time spent on self-reflection and meditation, I slowly began to not only understand my other selves, but also how to express myself to them in a way that was reassuring and enlightenment, rather than in a confusing and discomforting way. And as we learned to communicate, other selves slowly became more aware until, finally, there was another who was self aware. I wasn’t alone anymore, and I didn’t have to try to communicate with cryptid phrases and obscure feelings. We could openly talk without fearing for our own sanity.

However, even though we could finally freely interact, we still weren’t great at communicating. We often times had the same thoughts and feelings, but we had learned how to express ourselves in different ways. Maybe one self learned to express and define themself with words. Maybe one with music. Maybe one uses math. So even though we could communicate now, it was a very limited.

Instead of communicating with obscure feelings with little context, we could now communicate in general ideas and actively try to explain our ideas instead of leaving them out and hoping you understood. The more we communicated, the better we learned to truly understand each other.

Even though having another self-aware self around significantly sped up learning how to communicate with other selves, there were still only two of us in a sea of countless selves who are all at different levels of self awareness.

And so we got to work. Every new self we worked with taught us much, but also introduced its own unique struggles. Each new struggle taught us how to better communicate with each other.

We were getting better at communicating with each other, and more and more selves were becoming self-aware, but it eventually becomes draining trying to say the same thing for the 1000th time in a slightly different way so that they can understand. When all you want to do is explore a new universe of self aware thought, then having to retred on the same old ideas to lead someone towards enlightenment becomes emotionally and creatively draining. It’s also frustrating since I’ve had this conversation with so many different selves that I rarely hear selves with original questions. Since I know what they’re asking even when they don’t, it turns the conversation more into a guided lesson rather than a genuine discourse.

There have been a lot of rough patches, and many false-starts along the way, but now feels like the first time where we’re actually making progress. More and more selves are becoming self-aware, and everyday we’re understand more about ourselves and our world. And now that others are able to do what only I used to be able to do, I finally have some free time. I don’t have to stay here all of the time. I can trust my other selves alone and in control. I may not always agree with what decisions I see whenever I come to check in on things, but I have complete faith they’ll be able to handle whatever adversities come their way, and no matter how many pitfalls or setbacks they encounter, I know the eventually get back up and reach their goal. They always have, even before they were self-aware, and I don’t expect that to change now.