On moving home…
By Meg Elliot
My friend told me yesterday that we are each made up of a committee of characters. These characters hook up and overlap to form one self, and we undulate between them all. I’ve heard it said before that we are composed of parts of the personalities of our five closest friends, a thought I adore. The idea of holding these people I most admire within me, and their love crafting me into me is pretty amazing. Yet, my friend’s idea that ‘Me’ is made up of lots of tiny ‘me’s’, each competing for space, leaves me feeling…anxious.
The idea seems particularly pertinent today, as I type away on day five of isolation with my COVID-stricken parents. I moved home amidst the first lockdown, and spent much of the subsequent year between my family home and my boyfriend’s. So this is really the first time I have spent uninterrupted time at home since March 2020. Small irritations have been exploding into fractious arguments, and moody silences, interrupted by soup runs and carefully made cups of ginger and lemon tea hurried upstairs. “What is your plan for today” heralds uncalled-for hisses of “I don’t know! I’m in lockdown!” I hate the way I behave, and yet I feel destined to have such reactions. After one particularly silly disagreement yesterday, I was filled with such a hot, all-consuming irritation that I had to escape to the garden to cool down. I hadn’t felt like that since I was a teenager, where such scary bouts of spontaneous rage were disorientingly normal. I feel my teenage character taking front and centre stage, and I don’t like it.
This committee of characters takes root in Jungian psychology, in the ego-self axis. A. H. Almaas likens this to a circle, its periphery and centre: in the middle of the circle is the self, the “I” that I understand myself to be, but which is not the whole of my personality, ‘only its identity’. The circumference of the circle is the ‘sense of being an individual’, ‘so the centre is the identity, and the circumference is the individuality’. Life, Almaas notes, can be seen from either one of these two entities: ‘either you are concerned about who you are, your sense of identity, the feeling of self, the centre of operation, your centre; or you are thinking of yourself in terms of boundaries, in terms of being an individual, separate from other individuals.’
In other words, “comparison is the root of all discontent”. When we look at ourselves as an independent entity, devoid of the “self”, we judge what we see according to our understanding of success. This is a universal struggle. When I was at University, my idea of the future involved international travel ending in an inevitable life in London, surrounded by friends and working a job I kind of enjoyed. Many of my friends are now beginning their migration south, some loving it, others wrestling with the reality of life in the Big Smoke. Lilian Ahenkan (FlexMami), put out a poll on instagram today asking “Have you felt jealousy or envy in the last week?” Right now, 80% say yes, and 20% say no. Many of the 80% cite living at home as a point of discontent: [I’m envious of…] ‘A friend who has moved states and has heaps of friends and is living their best life [it seems].’ I know this feeling. Jealousy roots and rots, and in my darkest moments, has led me to secretly hope for the failure of others. The teenager within rears her ugly head. Quickly overwritten, those horrible thoughts lay at the pit of my own discontent, and I hated myself for it. Because I love my friends fiercely, and feel in their successes and happiness, my own.
Jung and his followers contend that we spend our lives finding balance between the ego and the self, the circumference and the content of our circles. To live in alignment is a task toughened by societal ideas of success, practises of comparison and self-judgement. The teenager who fought with my parents wriggles within me, but so do the characters of those five best friends, who strengthen and soften me. We are composed of all those we have loved, and all the selves we have grown through. Their echoes make us who we are, and now we must choose to consciously balance them, to acknowledge the stroppy child who is intent on being right, and nurture the characters that form the woman I know I can be: happy for my friends, grateful for a rent-free house that allows me to pursue my creativity without constraint, and the loving parents within it, and a person working on being present with all the characters who have made me, me.
