What Makes You You?

On "imagined audiences" and the objects that make us human. Plus, my college admissions essay.

My Dad loves the Civil War. I’m reminded of this by the two Civil War era bullets that sit on my desk — keepsakes from the time he took my brother Ben to Gettsyburg. My Dad and I aren’t speaking these days, so this morning I considered mailing the bullets back to him, since it seems a little unfair for me to have them when we aren’t in contact, but then it occurred to me that sending someone bullets when you’re in a fight could be interpreted as a threat, lol, so I decided against it.

And who am I kidding? I am not going to schlep to the post office anytime soon even if it was a good idea. As an elder millennial with advanced screensickness and ADHD, I fear the post office, and the physical and bureaucratic reality it implies. In fact, I once wrote an article for The Atlantic’s Wire website (RIP) under the headline, “Millennials Can’t Do Mail.” Am I not the voice of my generation?!!!

So anyway. One thing about me is I have my estranged Dad’s Civil War bullets on my desk, along with a quartz stone my first born son found and blue “magic rock” my second-born son found. There are three nails and a brass bell on this desk, too, along with my dead grandmother’s ashtray.

I also have a collection of tiny ceramic pomegranates my Mom and I bought in Bangkok when I was 10, each sculpted which such care and to what end? I do not know. They sit on the windowsill bathed in light and speak to me of memory of longing and loss.

What are we but our likes? Our interests? I used to think that we were a bundle of preferences. My Dad loves the Civil War. I love lemons. My husband loves vinegar and science. You get it.

But then I got pregnant and I stopped loving the things I had always loved. Bagels, my true food love, became nauseating to me. HOW COULD THAT BE? How could I be me and not love bagels? Maybe the cell-free DNA circulating in my body once a new human was being built inside it literally changed me into someone new?

Or maybe it was never as simple as me being a collection of opinions and preferences and aversions. Opinions change. Hormones change. Our brains get severed and we forget who we are. We smoke so much pot or drink so much whiskey that our memories cease encoding and we don’t really remember what we used to love or hate. We used to run in the mornings. Was that who we were? We used to think gardening was boring. Now we scatter seeds and watch them all day long to try to catch the moment of germination.

But there is an us in us. That doesn’t change. What is it?

Psychologists have identified some traits of personality that are so consistent they can be identified in infants and continue to be true of the person throughout their life. Parents know this. Your kid comes out as their own little person with certain proclivities, and these don’t really change.

Lately I’ve been lost down a nostalgia hole. I helped my mom move out of her house to downsize to a home more manageable and appropriate for her. In the piles of boxes and memories she’s kept I found my notebooks from when my Dad was in rehab and I was an 8th grader visiting for Family Week, notebooks from when I was first falling in love as a teen, and from right before I left for college.

The handwriting changes but the ideas don’t. All the shit I think about now — mortality, the shape of time, creativity, how to deal with the pain of never ever being able to truly know another person — all of these are the same things I’ve been thinking about since I have kept records of my thoughts. I just forgot I’d already thought them.

Increasingly I think we are our curiosities, we are our proclivities, our tendencies. Our traumas, maybe. Left to my own devices, my inertia takes me back to the same questions I obsessed over as a child.

Wesleyan University recently sent me my college admission essay, at my request. It is basically the same thoughts I’ve been writing up in a book proposal the past few months.

Here is that essay:

Topic of your choice: Please describe your tactic for self-preservation.

I used to dread the moment before I was marched to my room for the night. It's way past your bed time, young lady; say goodnight to everyone. No matter the extent of my pleading and whining and crying and pleading, each night I looked out over my toes, through the window, past the trees, to the bright city skyline. I couldn't believe that my parents would so easily abandon me, abandon me to a room that creaked and moaned, where the trees brushed up against my windows and hissed at me. To get me to sleep and to salvage some faith in my parents, I pretended they didn't, in fact, leave me alone, and eventually I believed it.

Once my mother left my room, I would close my eyes and imagine my parents asleep. Then suddenly, after a couple of minutes, both of my parents would jump out of bed, put on their sneakers and tie their robes tightly around their waists. My parents would go around the house rousing everyone but me -my brother, his nurse, the dog- and then walk into the yard to meet my teachers, my friends, and the Muffin Man from The Donut Shop. All together they would creep to the grove of trees outside my first-floor window. There they would stand, hidden by darkness and spruce leaves, and watch me until I fell asleep. I assumed they watched over me as I slept because they loved me and wanted to make sure I was safe. They couldn't sleep until I did.

Every night until I was ten years old I tried to sleep interestingly for the people outside my window. I tossed and turned, and sighed and moaned. I would pretend to awaken with a start just to worry them, and then wink out into the darkness. Just kidding, I'm fine. These were the moments I felt safe, watched over by the people who meant the most to me. But then the lives of my parents changed, and what they wanted didn't coincide with what I wanted. My mother moved my two brothers and me to Sun Valley, Idaho, leaving my dad back in Los Angeles. Suddenly my room was on the second floor of the house and I couldn't conceive of people climbing up the drain pipe to watch me sleep. I tried at first to convince myself that my father flew to Idaho every night to see me breathing to a regular rhythm, but I quickly abandoned that idea as ludicrous and couldn't decide who to blame for my strange new isolation.

The breaking down of my family and the move to a new town catapulted me into adolescence; I found I wanted to abandon all of my childlike dispositions. I didn't want to be at the whim of my parents, those people who were responsible for shattering my world and who then expected me to readily accept the new pasted together version. So I decided to become self sufficient, except that those people who watched over me wouldn't leave me alone. I began to see their watching as an invasion of my privacy and an insult. That they came to protect me meant I couldn't protect myself. I began turning off all the lights in my room and drawing the curtains closed at night; I wanted them to get bored of watching me and go away. I needed someone to blame for my confusion, and so I blamed those people I loved the most, the people outside my window. But somewhere deep down I knew they weren't really there, and that if anyone was to blame for their "peering and spying" it was I, for they were my invention and delusion. This is ridiculous; they aren't watching me; it's cold out there; go to sleep.

After a few months of aggressive independence, I realized how much I needed the people in my life, and gradually I began opening the curtains at night. I knew my idea of my teachers and friends and important adults lining up under my window was irrational; I knew it was selfish; I knew it was childish, but I needed it. The creation of constant eyes at my window is my method of self preservation.

Imagined Audience

I don’t know if there is a term in psychology for the phenomenon that essay is describing, but even now as a 39-year-old, I admit that I still have some of that magical thinking. It’s not literal like it was as a kid, where I literally imagined that people I knew were watching me when I was alone. (Also, LOL, in reality the people I imagined watching me outside my window were the boys I had a crush on in school, but for the sake of the college essay I see I changed it to be much more wholesome. Once I moved to Idaho, I did used to image my Dad, as well, but beside him where my crushes, not my teachers and family members.) Now my imagied audience is more like, as I’m in my car singing along to Fiona Apple, part of me thinks the other drivers around me are taking note. They see me. They are my imagined audience. As I walk down the street, I imagine I have witnesses, whether the people walking past me actually see me or not. You are my imagined audience, too, as a reader of words I wrote. Maybe this need to feel like I’m a tree falling in a forest in front of someone is part of what makes me me. Maybe it’s what makes me a writer? The search for witness. Maybe it’s what makes the tragedy of mortal life more bearable, the idea that someone, at least, notices.

I think this concept of an imaginary audience is also part of what drives us to social media, at least what drives me. I haven’t been on Twitter in many months, and I feel like I lost an important witness to my life. I know that sounds so over dramatic, and it’s fine, I’ll survive, but it feels like an actual loss. When I post on Instagram, it’s this itch I am scratching. When I write this newsletter, too.

Thank you for being my witnesses.

P.S. I’d love to hear if you relate to this at all. Or know of a term for it in psychology.