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 that self appears closer to a video that I can rewind/ff/etc. 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 myselves 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 the 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 when we began to become 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 actual 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 last 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 finally 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 defime themself with words. Maybe one is 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’re understood. The more we communicated, the better we learned to truly understand each other. And 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, and even though we were getting better at communicating with each other, and more and more selves were becoming self-aware, 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.
• Random thought: what we call our conscience may really be a self-aware self trying to communicate and guide us.
• Now that I think about it, I think kids often times experience self-awareness, before eventually losing it. A few things trigger this thought
1. For how little education and experience they have in life, and even though they do some really stupid things, kids have provided some of the most profound commentary on life I’ve ever heard.
2. My logic as to why happens is this: when you’re young and someone asks you how you learned something or why you said something, they think it’s cute and playful when you say your invisible friends told you. But when you get older, saying invisible people told you secret knowledge is a lot more unsettling. Kids don’t know that hearing voices is associated with insanity, so when they hear voices, they don’t ignore them in fear of being ostracized, but rather are happy to have another friend.
3. I think children eventually reach an age where they still believe in their friends that only they can see, but are told, either directly or indirectly, that a) no one actually believes they exist; b) having imaginary friends are things for children and losers; and c) that if you honestly believe they’re real, then you are crazy. Kids don’t know what it means to be insane, but they know people don’t like and are afraid of insane people. So they have a crossroads: do they continue taking with their invisible friend and be known as the weird freak who talks to themself, or do they choose to be “normal.” most people choose normalcy. At first they still hear the voices, but they don’t yet people, and they don’t answer in public. When they understand what insanity can look like, they start ignoring the voice even when they’re alone. If they do acknowledge a voice in their head, they claim it as their own inner monolog. Hearing voices in your head isn’t crazy if it’s your own voice, right? But all this does is alienate the self. By taking away it’s voice, you’ve taken away it’s individuality and it’s agency over itself. The self-aware self keeps trying to reach their friend, but eventually they give up. Eventually, we convince ourselves this inner monolog really does orginate from us. In that moment we lose the part of us they achieved self-awareness so easily. The individual self with unique thoughts and feelings is assimilated into the dominant self, losing all sense of identity and losing the ability to autonomously exist.
4. When the self is assimilated, it doesn’t just disappear. The voice remains in your head, but it’s no longer alive. It has been turned into your inner monolog. You can still have conversations in your head, but now it’s you practicing a conversation by playing both parts. An inner monlog is really important, and it’s a very usefully mental tool, but trading a self-aware identity capable of not only talking to you, but also teaching you things outside of your knowledge and experience, is like trading a super computer for a 4 function calculator because you’re afraid of being known as the guy who carries around a computer.
♡Sugar☆World☮ 