Divided Self and the Voices in my Head

So the hearing voices? I sort of just take for granted. Not in an auditory hallucination way, but, for a certain kind of thought, words are just the unit of thought, their currency. Still I was reminded when my friend Patrick wrote about his own voices that hearing voices is one of the classic signs of the crazies. I don’t think that all thought is words — when I am adjusting a muscle to change the tone of the viola, putting words on the process is as an after-the-fact approximation, and I think sometimes I have emotional responses that come long before I have the words for them. But for the thought that talks about itself, words are it.

External world, I know, words aren’t so much the unit of the thought as the unit of communication. And because the “voices” in my head are the coalescing of a stream of words, I wonder if they don’t start becoming different parts of the self talking one to the other. Because as soon as one of the voices has staked a position, up pops an interlocutor in an opposing one, like a good little Socratic cipher.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways the self gets divided, probably inspired in part by Jonathon Haidt’s chapter on “The Divided Self” in The Happiness Hypothesis. I tseems historical to divide up the self, to go back to Plato’s, charioteer metaphor in the Phaedrus, or refer to Freud. Haidt draws up four classic divisions — mind versus body, left brain versus right brain, the evolutionarily new brain versus the older, primitive brain. and the controlled functions of the brain versus the more automatic. Which makes me wish for a more comprehensive list of the ways I divide myself –

• the emotional versus the rational

• the mother versus the child

• the critic versus the creator

• what I should do versus what I am resigned to knowing I will actually do

• the fatalist versus the optimist

• the person I could have become had X happened versus who I am now

And of course, such a list cannot be comprehensive. It’s all about the opposition, that the position staked invites a polarity. The critic doesn’t arise to meet the child (though that thought entertains me!). It reminds me of my two youngest kids playing opposites — they always start out with simple adjectives, obvious ones, old and new, high and low, short and tall. Then the colors sneak in, which you can manage from a color wheel schema. But inevitably an older brother will ask a noun, and we learn that the opposite of tree is grass, or of Mom is Dad. Of lightbulb is fish.

Sighing, a little, my self is not so much divided right now as fractured, using the computer at the dining table in order to be present with my still a month shy of six-year-old while he writes a story for his homework without hovering hawk-like over each labored word, until my own frustration and boredom makes the whole exercise impossible. My attention goes back and forth between notes I’d jotted on a potential blog entry during a cello lesson, and his paper, reminding him “Capitalize the first letter of the sentence, sweetie.” How much do I correct and fix? He’s supposed to underline subjects and predicates, words he has apparently never heard before. I waver between annoyance that homework has to be so much teaching rather than reinforcement, and thinking that I’m probably the most qualified person to teach him, anyway, being tuned into how much frustration he can take, how much encouragement he needs, what he understands or not. If I don’t sit here, he is incapable of sitting and keeping at it, and his first draft was one very long string of subjects and predicates linked by “so”s and “then”s.

I watch the clock, relentless moving forward, as clocks will, realizing that if I still want to practice with the four of them and get one to a birthday party and get something on the table for dinner that is not just a microwaved frozen meal, I am going to have to step it up. The accumulation of the million tiny choices that have to carry us through the afternoon, the awareness of the choosing after choosing in a string, might be the form of grace I need, if I could break the paralysis of feeling frustrated and hopeless. I am already in a small agony from having been unable to get us all out the door to the Sunday school that they go to each week (letting down people who count on us being there!) but they were fighting, and I was embarrassingly overwhelmed. Six more days until Raven is home. Hit publish, knowing that I didn’t perfectly capture the crystalline completeness of the thought that this blog entry was born from, but maybe this is more truthful? The tensions between voices and selves and roles just something I keep having to learn to manage.