You're every move you make

2010.11.11
Days Remaining: 199

1. I'm kind of wondering what my intentions are in writing this blog. I don't really update on major developments, or at least not consistently, because so far there haven't been many other than the divorce process and the start of the Fall semester. The past few days I've basically written rambling lectures about stuff I find interesting, but I don't imagine that this is very interesting to most of you who read this. I could use this as a sort of day-book or diary, just recounting stuff that happened on any given day, I've never had much interest in doing that before, and find that some days I don't feel like writing.

2. This afternoon/evening I attended a presentation by one of my colleagues in the Philosophy Department (this year I'm technically a hybrid between Religious Studies and Philosophy in my official appointment). His lecture, which was extremely interesting, was about the often-dispensed advice "be true to yourself" and why he thinks that is basically a nonsensical (in philosophical, not experiential) piece of advice. I won't go into the full argument, though he actually demonstrated his point very clearly (basically, "be true to yourself" usually means something else if it means anything, and so it's at best unclear and at worst misleading). What struck me was that I and a couple other people there (faculty and students) responded with questions about what sort of self was implied by his analysis (he granted, for the sake of argument, that we each have an authentic self to which our behavior can more or less conform). If you don't grant a stable authentic self, the "be true to yourself" maxim falls apart.

3. How is this related to my first paragraph? There's a great book by the philosopher Alexander Nehamas entitled The Art of Living in which he argues that philosophy is, in part, a project of self-fashioning, of creating who you are. Of course, that project is something in which everyone is engaged all the time if we don't have stable selves; we're all manufacturing ourselves all the time. But Nehamas' point is more about the process and how philosophy can help us do it more or less effectively (he starts with Sokratēs and runs up to Foucault, with very useful detours about Montaigne and Nietzsche). One of the most basic parts of the process is that it's largely narrative in nature - we're constantly (re)telling ourselves who we were, who we are, and who we will be.

4. Right now I'm not completely sure who I am anymore. I'm not talking about a full-blown meltdown or anything of the sort. I mean I'm trying to parse out who I have become over the past five years of being with my ex-wife, moving to New England, making the choices that I've made and working through their consequences, making new choices growing out of the older ones, and so forth. I spent a lot of time and energy working on who I was before I got married, composing rather than simply repeating the story that I wanted to be myself. I had hit a couple of rough spots near the end of my bachelorhood, which probably factored into getting married so quickly. But getting married ended up leading to either suspending or losing several key things in the life I wanted to live, or the person I wanted to be. I shifted my primary focus away from my friends and family towards my ex-wife, and became far more responsive than active. I put down lots of my basic organizing principles for my day to day life (record keeping practices, lifestyle choices, etc.).

5. One of my professors (great guy, btw) at Syracuse told me once (the only piece of positive useful information I got from a Heidegger seminar, and it characteristically had nothing to do with Heidegger) that marriage is a process of getting to know the person you married. You always (or often) marry your image of a person, and then find yourself actually married to another human being (this changes, somewhat, with the increasing frequency of pre-marital cohabitation, but the basic point still stands). That ended up being very true for me, but now I'm learning that I need to get to know myself again as a bachelor. I thought I was the person who had entered the marriage, but I think that I'll have to rebuild, or re-compose, that me. And it won't ever be the same. My story now involves several chapters that I'm still trying to integrate into a unified story, and to reconcile with the pre-married chapters. And I need to figure out how to build out from that framework. It's intimidating, actually, especially because there is no "me" that stands outside of it and makes editorial or authorial choices; I'm always already caught up in the pattern and am attempting to shape it further, but I've only got these tools and these materials right now. Reconstituting my previous repertoire, or assembling a new one ("Self" Repertoire 2.0), is going to take time, and a lot of work.

6. I hate having worked so hard the past few years, struggling through interminable fights, loving and being angry and hurt all the time. And it's not only because it was all difficult, but because it left me exhausted, and without an empty tab at the end. Instead, I'm filled up of debt, regret, and an unsteady future. I don't like this me very much. I didn't like the me I was the past few years (not total self-loathing, btw, just a general sense of "this isn't who I want to be"). And becoming the me I want to be will take effort and willingness to make hard choices, as I'm still trying to recuperate from the past several years. My therapist suggested last session that I need to "give myself time off." Set an arbitrary "restart" point in 2011, and worry about all of this then. But I can't. "All of this" is happening now. The story never stops being told.

7. So maybe this blog is, at least embryonically, part of that process. I stopped writing when I stopped doing anything but reacting a few weeks ago, reacting to my anniversary and to my workload, and shutting down from both. But shutting down isn't stopping the story, it's just hitting the space bar in unending sequence. Damn it. I have so much work to do, and I'm so tired.