Invictus

Is it possible that a person possesses multiple contextual selves, each acting in a different manner, given a specific environment, and each having different kinds of relations with different persons? What happens when these selves meet? Will we experience incongruence from the differences between these selves? What happens when persons you interact with in one persona meet persons you interact with from another persona? When relationships clash? Who will you be then? Where will you define the unit that is ‘you’? Will you take the social constructionist paradigm and suggest that a single ‘you’ does not exist, and that ‘you’ are a mere collection of different ‘selves’? Will you say that each self is a different expression of ‘yourself’ and that ‘you’ are the sum of your parts? Or will you take the existential-humanistic route and say that there is a single unitary authentic you, which you are in the process of ‘finding’? And worse, who will you leave behind?

The experience of being left behind is unfortunately the greatest cause of emotional pain that I have had the misfortune of undergoing. To internalise that one day, some day, you’re no longer needed, no longer wanted, no longer important, that the person that you are, or the person that you were, is no longer relevant in the larger context of the relationships in your life. It is easy to crouch this in romantic relational constructs, but I find myself resisting it, although I fear I am less than successful in this endeavour, leaving me embittered. To know that every beginning, every action, every thing which you accomplish, must one day end. Must one day cease. That every love song, despite its sweetness, will ascend into the ether and fade, as all things must. To function within the confines of inevitable mortality, will you cease the moment? Or will you wrangle your hands in futility?

The quest to ‘find oneself’, as it were, seems to be a daunting and somewhat ridiculous task in light of changing relationships and contexts. But the question of ‘who will you be?’ or worse, ‘who will she be?’ is a demon raging unfettered in the confines of the soul, tearing and rending and clawing its way inexorably to the surface. The question of who you are. Or worse, who the other significant person in your life is, evokes a single question: ‘am I loved?’ It’s a fragile thing isn’t it? Much like a flower uncertainly blossoming in spring, beautiful but wary, and delicate in form, so easily destroyed by a late frost, or a mere traveller on life’s byways. Victor Hugo once wrote that the greatest happiness is in believing in the depth of your soul, that you are loved by another. I believe that to be true. I know it to be true. It's the single light of faith which sustains my every breath.

Diane, if you're reading this, I love you.

The dreamer in the soul yearns, yet is chained down so mightily by reality and circumstance that it may never see another sunrise. I believe in the single unitary self. I believe, despite all evidence that points to the contrary, that the person, the self, that I am is an indivisible unit. “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul”, to quote William Henley. Yet to speak of the “I” as a construct necessarily entails an intrinsic selfishness and self-absorbedness which I resist mightily. I am undecided as to whether rueful laughter or fists clenched in frustrated rage is the appropriate response to the irony inherent in that sentence. Mayhap man is the only creature conceited enough to selfishly consider himself as attempting to deny selfishness.

Yet it’s so easy to lose ‘yourself’ to one of the myriad contextual selves that we construct, so much so that with continued activation, with continued application of that schema, that we adopt that facet as our own. That the ‘me’ becomes essentially just a mere facet of what ‘used to be me’. I fear that. I dread that. Not only in myself but in others around me. Will I be left behind? Will you be left behind? Who will you be in the capricious journey we call life?

I’ll leave you with William Henley’s oft quoted piece, which somehow gives me a measure of comfort in a world grown cold. Oh, to be a word-smith of such calibre, shaping not gold or precious jewels, but ideas in the forge of one’s soul.

Invictus – William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.