Fictional Selves

This is the time of year when self assessment tends to come to the surface, at least in the overthoughtful sort of personality. Not that I would know anything about that...

The corrosive effect of a fictional self comes from the attribution of a whole other life based on one choice, or event - I imagine that we tend to fixate on how our lives would have been better. While Sliding Doors is a good movie, and it might be fun to reflect on how life would be different had I done this or that, fixating on that possible, imagined self cannot be good.

This lack of complexity in thinking about oneself and one's capacity to create good in one's life is, in its extreme form, an instance of monomania. That is a strong term I realize, but think about how easy it is to fixate on the fictional, possible me, had I not quit ballet, or had I chosen that job instead of the one I did.

I got this idea from a New York Times article called The New Year's Cocktail: Regret with a Dash of Bitters, here

It's so well written; I think sometimes about the person I would be, had I never quit ballet, or had I kissed him that time instead of turning my face away. True, an infinite set of possibilities does follow from each choice we make, but attributing an entirely different self because of that single outcome - well that's just a recipe for crazy.

Anyway, the article is well worth a read, I liked this bit:

Even the perspective from which people remember slights or mistakes can affect the memories’ emotional impact, new research suggests. A recent Columbia study found that reimagining painful scenes from a third-person point of view, as if seeing oneself in a movie, blunted their emotional sting and facilitated precisely the sort of clearheaded self-perception that Dr. King described.

Widen the screen just a little, in fact, and a particularly prominent and disturbing lost self can be seen as merely one guest in a room full of permutations, good and bad. And each of those selves must have an idealized doppelgänger of its own.

It's easy to disdain people who believe that "everything happens for a reason", as naive, but perhaps they're on to something. Not necessarily because of their faith in a being that controls the universe. Faith is incidental to the attribute this article describes, called complexity. Understanding that (mis)fortune is not entirely in one's own hands seems helpful. As attractive as existential philosophy seems, I do not know that the fundamental, absolute primacy of the individual, and individual choice, is a realistic perspective on the world. It certainly is not a helpful one.

Why am I going on about this? Well, it's easy to think of January 1 as some sort of reset button. It seems most rational (and it is clearly pragmatic, as it contributes to psychological well-being) to understand that we do not start afresh but we continue.

Having said all that, a reflective mood is hard to resist, and I do have thoughts on what I'd like to try, or do differently, or quit doing. Don't we all. I just need to refrain from attachment to my doppelgänger, when she comes to mind. The one who can dance in toe shoes.