TALKING TO MYSELF is a habit I picked up when I was little. I did it both ways—as a direct address—a parental voice--you can do this, Amanda, kind of voice—but also in third person, as if talking about someone I know well and with confidence: Amanda will love this, Amanda will appreciate this.
The second way, talking about myself in third person, seems to work particularly well when I’m trying to accomplish a task I’m loath to do. I just decide I’m someone else doing a favor for me. I used to think this kind of self-splitting was kind of insane, but now I’m understanding this as a profound psychological tool known as “distanced self-talk.”
Talking out loud to ourselves about ourselves immediately “mutes the amygdala” and has the power to sever cycles of rumination, creating new pathways and possibilities. I looked into it after seeing a few videos about it and lo and behold, this has always been a thing I knew how to do but had no name for it. Now that I know the benefits, I find myself talking out loud to and about myself more often and it feels like magic.
If the great drive of human life is to minimize surprise, we’re not doing so well to affirm our futures. I’m reading about the free-energy principle, the notion that at any given time, any self-organizing system, from a cell all the way to a human, is basically working to infer and predict so as to minimize disruption that would demand a change in behavior or a move to a different environment.
Minimize surprise? Until a few years ago, I was chasing it. Perhaps I’ve realized that reality is indeed hidden from us behind a consciousness veil and the limits of our own sensory experiences! Perhaps now I’m better attuned to the beauty of boredom as the ultimate life-affirming state. It hurts my brain to read Pollan’s latest, A World Appears, a book about consciousness. It feels like a silly attempt to hold water in one’s hands.
But I do appreciate the barebones reminder that our main task is to stay alive through basic considerations such as body temperature and rest. Proof of life is existence of resistance to entropy. Don’t ask me to explain any of this, I’m just here taking notes and talking to myself. Amanda wants to understand how consciousness works so that she can make contact beyond the veil.
Often we think of a future self comforting a past self—the wiser, older version of us who knows better now. But sometimes it’s the before self who comes to comfort the current or future self, who comes through to remind her of what she always wanted and needed and urges her to seek it.
In the last few years before my father’s body finally surrendered to entropic forces destined to dismiss his will to live, he dreamed of a home library—a large bookcase of his own to store his books.
You’d think this was easy enough to accomplish but no—our mother’s addiction to the Wheel of Fortune meant that a huge television box occupied the space where the bookshelves might have gone—and so it was like this for years, my father storing his books on small shelves within a closet.
It would take a few more years after my mother died—and I lugged the television out to the trash with sudden Herculean strength one day in a fit of that’s-enough-ness—that a space was made for the possibility of a home library. Finally, the day came when my boyfriend agreed to pick up the IKEA bookshelf, deliver it to the home, and piece it together for my father.
And then came the great migration of all his books to their new homes on shelves, all in once place. He was thrilled and so were we to see a dream come through in such vivid there-ness. Books about jazz and Jewish humor, books about poetry and English education, prayer books and cookbooks, books about the psychology of mind, books by Victor Frankl and Miles Davis, books about Broadway and show tunes, books about plants and god and consciousness.
The books remain there in his prized home library. I haven’t added much to it but seeing all those books in once place makes me dream of a home library of my own. I know it sounds absurd—I’m trying to downsize and purge—what’s with this desire for more books?
The bookshelf as apothecary, I suppose: each book, a tincture for the mind inside a soul and the soul inside a mind. I’ve dreamed of such libraries, floor-to-ceiling, since before the days of Insta-fever dreams depicting these fantasies!
A meticulously organized home library creates space for long conversations with yourself. A place to hear oneself talking to the void—pressing up against every single possibility—minding the mind.
The second way, talking about myself in third person, seems to work particularly well when I’m trying to accomplish a task I’m loath to do. I just decide I’m someone else doing a favor for me. I used to think this kind of self-splitting was kind of insane, but now I’m understanding this as a profound psychological tool known as “distanced self-talk.”
Talking out loud to ourselves about ourselves immediately “mutes the amygdala” and has the power to sever cycles of rumination, creating new pathways and possibilities. I looked into it after seeing a few videos about it and lo and behold, this has always been a thing I knew how to do but had no name for it. Now that I know the benefits, I find myself talking out loud to and about myself more often and it feels like magic.
If the great drive of human life is to minimize surprise, we’re not doing so well to affirm our futures. I’m reading about the free-energy principle, the notion that at any given time, any self-organizing system, from a cell all the way to a human, is basically working to infer and predict so as to minimize disruption that would demand a change in behavior or a move to a different environment.
Minimize surprise? Until a few years ago, I was chasing it. Perhaps I’ve realized that reality is indeed hidden from us behind a consciousness veil and the limits of our own sensory experiences! Perhaps now I’m better attuned to the beauty of boredom as the ultimate life-affirming state. It hurts my brain to read Pollan’s latest, A World Appears, a book about consciousness. It feels like a silly attempt to hold water in one’s hands.
But I do appreciate the barebones reminder that our main task is to stay alive through basic considerations such as body temperature and rest. Proof of life is existence of resistance to entropy. Don’t ask me to explain any of this, I’m just here taking notes and talking to myself. Amanda wants to understand how consciousness works so that she can make contact beyond the veil.
Often we think of a future self comforting a past self—the wiser, older version of us who knows better now. But sometimes it’s the before self who comes to comfort the current or future self, who comes through to remind her of what she always wanted and needed and urges her to seek it.
In the last few years before my father’s body finally surrendered to entropic forces destined to dismiss his will to live, he dreamed of a home library—a large bookcase of his own to store his books.
You’d think this was easy enough to accomplish but no—our mother’s addiction to the Wheel of Fortune meant that a huge television box occupied the space where the bookshelves might have gone—and so it was like this for years, my father storing his books on small shelves within a closet.
It would take a few more years after my mother died—and I lugged the television out to the trash with sudden Herculean strength one day in a fit of that’s-enough-ness—that a space was made for the possibility of a home library. Finally, the day came when my boyfriend agreed to pick up the IKEA bookshelf, deliver it to the home, and piece it together for my father.
And then came the great migration of all his books to their new homes on shelves, all in once place. He was thrilled and so were we to see a dream come through in such vivid there-ness. Books about jazz and Jewish humor, books about poetry and English education, prayer books and cookbooks, books about the psychology of mind, books by Victor Frankl and Miles Davis, books about Broadway and show tunes, books about plants and god and consciousness.
The books remain there in his prized home library. I haven’t added much to it but seeing all those books in once place makes me dream of a home library of my own. I know it sounds absurd—I’m trying to downsize and purge—what’s with this desire for more books?
The bookshelf as apothecary, I suppose: each book, a tincture for the mind inside a soul and the soul inside a mind. I’ve dreamed of such libraries, floor-to-ceiling, since before the days of Insta-fever dreams depicting these fantasies!
A meticulously organized home library creates space for long conversations with yourself. A place to hear oneself talking to the void—pressing up against every single possibility—minding the mind.
