Alternative life

I’m thinking seriously of staying longer, for at least a year. It’s such a relief to be out of university, free. It’s like an entire alternative life, living here. My self is changing, adapting to the new environment; I’m populating my world with people I like, adding language slowly, learning to speak again, adapting my old habits to new situations, renewing myself. I like the feeling of another life. It’s as close I’ll ever get to being someone else, which I think is one of our deepest desires; cosmetic surgery, charismatic men with self-help bestsellers, relationships. There is such restlessness in a coalesced self, such a desire for change vying with the safety of habit. I don’t know why people assume that their self is somehow fixed, that after the turbulence of teenage formation the self is sacrosanct, an unchangeable vantage point from which we see the world. It’s not true at all. A self is an adaptation to an environment. When you’re a child, your parents look eagerly to see the formation of habits, things of note which, cumulatively, form the self. I think the self appears fixed primarily through our interactions with other selves, other people – other people confirm our selves to us, they tell us that that is who we are because this is how it looks to them. A self is simply a collection of habits, routines, methods of dealing with the world, set paths which can be changed slightly to deal with new situations. But habits can be changed. One of my Japanese conversation students told me of her time in America. She spent two years there, and she felt her ‘Japaneseness’ lifting away. “To live as an American is a very easy way to live,” she said. “You just do your own thing, you let it all hang out, you don’t think so much of society or other people.” Then, she came back and her Japaneseness reimposed itself. “I felt the Japanese way of thinking creeping back in,” she said, “and while I’d prefer to think like an American, this is Japan.” She readily adapted her self to her new environment and back again. As for me, I started to invert my personality after I was 16. I used to be horrifically shy; now, I characterise myself as an extrovert. I chose to change myself largely as a reaction to the way I was before, which I hated. In fact, you could say that I define myself largely against the former version of me. Here, it’s happening too, to a lesser degree. There’s no place for reticence, Australian tall-poppy embarrassment, no use for my own unthinking deferral to authority.

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I don’t know if you’ve read it, but The Dice Man is a cult book from the 1960’s which deals with the self. The main character tries to dissolve his self and replace it with a multitude of minority selves by writing down options for actions and then rolling a dice to decide which he would do. He tries to break down the habits which constitute himself and replace them with randomness, unpredictability. It’s an excellent book.