I learned of it about seven years ago and it scared me. I was in the kitchen making breakfast. My wife, Jo, was in the den. I heard her call out to me, “Who are you talking to?” “No one,” I replied. Then I realized that I was talking to myself. I did not take the news well. I was sure, although I was of riper years and knew old people talk to themselves regularly, that I was not one of them. My fall from innocence was swift. I became very self-conscious and even felt that I might be losing my wits. Was I perhaps becoming one of those people who suffer with multiple personalities? My favorite physician and essayist, Lewis Thomas, reassured me that I was not crazy. It was a profound relief.
I recalled how Lewis once wrote about a wave of public interest in a psychiatric condition then known as multiple personality disorder. Persons suffering from this condition claimed to have been possessed by several selves. According to Thomas, one such person, a woman, appeared on a television show. She claimed to possess or be possessed by eight separate women, all different, each with a separate name, and all vying for control over her. She wished to be rid of all of them, except the real one, which would be herself. Who that might be wasn’t clear.
Lewis raised an interesting thought; that having that number of selves is not all that pathological. In fact, eight is a reasonable and manageable number for most of us. The problem would be that they all show up at once, vying for control rather than appearing in an orderly way, politely waiting their turn.
I, for one, am aware of having several selves even before I discovered that I talked to myself. Fortunately for me, most showed up at appropriate times and remained orderly. My erotic self, for instance, might be called out by seeing beautiful women, my aggressive self by an irritating colleague. I swear at my computer when it tells me I’ve created a fatal error. My compassionate self is moved when witnessing someone’s suffering and my impatient self is triggered by telephone solicitors or waiting in long lines at the checkout counter – waiting as an elderly person searches for her glasses to sign a check for her groceries. The list could go on endlessly, but the problem remains; just who among these persons is the real me.
I have come to understand that the issue is not that I might posses a number of selves, but that I could not manage them in a way that would help me maintain some measure of equanimity. The old expression, herding cats, comes to mind.
Those of us – and I know this is not a habit exclusively of the aging – who talk to ourselves, offer clinical evidence that we are indeed possessed by several selves. Our conversations – more often arguments – that we engage in with ourselves are ways we give a voice to all the contenders who demand to be heard. I usually talk to myself while I’m walking, performing some domestic chore, writing or reading disturbing news. I think of it now as a form of psychological democracy in which by talking to myself I honor my several voices while also knowing that I must, at the end of the day, decide which voice serves me best.
As a small child, I had an aunt who was very overweight. When she sat in a chair, she spilled over the sides of it. I liked her and thought she was wonderful. In my exuberance, one day I poked her spillover and giggled. My mother, horrified, sent me to my room. Now that’s a voice I learned quickly to never give heed to again – not my mother’s, but the voice that told me to poke Aunt Kate. I might hear the voice, ponder it respectfully, but never dignify it with action.
For those who are disturbed at the thought of having several selves, just consider the alternative for a moment.
You would probably be an embarrassment to yourself and others if it turned out that you possessed only one self. You would bring to all situations the same predictable voice. Such rigidity and lack of imagination, most of us think of as maddening, irritating, and certainly boring.
There’s a popular myth that those with strong character never change their minds. We honor people like that for their determination, their resoluteness. Actually, the inability to change your mind is a form of madness. No matter how hard you may try to convince someone who is delusional that everybody is not really out to get him, he’ll remain resolute in his conviction and think you’re the guy with the problem. As hard as you try he’ll never change his mind.
As an essayist, my various selves challenge me regularly to speak their voice and say what they feel. Who among these selves dare I heed and allow to become my voice? Maybe that’s the point: that for most of us, among our several selves is an organizer, a decider, the one who makes the final call of who needs most to be acknowledged.
It’s in knowing who’s who that saves the day.
Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.
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Robert Whitehill says
As a Quaker, I listen to many voices, some divine, some arcane, some my own. As a screenwriter and an author, I often give utterance to the things my characters might wish to say. My wife says many of these familiars are not welcome in our home, so I harbor them until she is out. I feel the weight of intimacies I have not shared with her. The scripts and books become depostions of the company I have kept.
-Robert Blake Whitehill