Kafkain Self-Doubt, revisited

I’m gonna talk about me. I grew up in a vipassana house, where an awareness of my own biases of perception, particularly of self-perception, only made the adolescent struggle with self-consciousness all the more poignant, all the more brutal. How could I know how other people saw me? Who was I? How was I supposed to behave? A lot of these issues came out in a brief piece I wrote called “Kafkain Self-Doubt,” which was a fabulous idea that was terribly developed. A real literary disappointment. Gregor, of the Metamorphosis, never knew he was a cockroach, no one ever told him. They shunned him and his own sister threw the apple that would eventually kill him, but no one ever said, "You know, Gregor, you're a cockroach." He scurried around until his death without the benefit of a reliable reflection of his current transformation, which is really a brilliant metaphor for adolescent ennui. I’m not saying that’s what Kafka intended. How could anyone know what Kafka intended? I’m just saying that it’s beautifully applicable, and that it’s very much what I was going through as a young man.

How do you build an identity? Fill it out? Inside I couldn’t see any trace of me. Nothing that was truly, independently me, you know? And that of course is one of the great truths at the center of Buddhism, because there is no independent self. How could there be? All things exist in relationship with all other things, so independence is ultimately impossible. It is a fiction, an illusion, and a very problematic one. So there I am, and I can’t find anything inside of me. No soul, no hopes or dreams, with the obvious exception of getting laid, so how do I know who I am?

Outside I wasn’t having any luck either, which is very much the trouble of Gregor. I’m trying to look at my reflection in the behavior and opinions of other people, and other people have no idea who I am either. All they have to go on is the me that I put forward, which is the me I have pieced together throughout my life. So I’m a freshman in college and I’m continually playing out, through these social interactions, the growth of the seeds of a personality I began to plant long ago, in third or fourth grade, or perhaps even earlier. In fact it’s probably all just the same stuff, from my birth onward, replaying itself, reinterpreting itself, ingesting and expunging the essence of my personality. And here I am, and I’m in a way “inside” this personality, but at the same time I am this personality, and I’m trying to make adjustments and optimize my effectiveness as a human being but at the same time I’m also trying to figure out who this human being is. That, I think, is the primary duality of an adolescent mind. That is where the trouble lurks and that is very difficult for older adults to understand because most of them have been so locked into the belief that they know who they are that they didn’t even notice this quest for self-discovery while it was happening, let alone 10 years later when the shell has largely solidified and they have this concept of themselves based on the shoes they wear and who their friends are sleeping with. I tell you, it’s a mess to grow up. A real mess.

The real mystery of course is the degree to which this is still going on. I’m sure it’s still going on, I’m absolutely positive. I’m still being conditioned and I’m still reforming myself based on what happens in my life and I still have no idea who I am. I have some idea of a larger self that isn’t limited to this body and this personality or even this planet, but when it comes to small me, small mind small body small personality, I am clueless. But I’m doing alright. I don’t know where it’s gonna go. I don’t know what choices I will have to make. I’m still a kid, you know. I try to tell people that, that they’re still kids, that we’re all still kids, but most of them don’t believe me. But look at yourself in a mirror, for a while. A long while. And then write a paragraph about who you think you are, and see how much of it exists independently of your environment, past and present. You might be surprised.