notes from above ground

xxix

While I was driving, I came upon someone riding a bike. They started flashing their lights as I got closer. I felt a little offended at the announcement of their presence, as if I was totally unaware of it and needed a flashing light to catch on.

I passed them, making sure to give them more than enough space, and found myself with a bitter, resentful feeling. I had to talk myself off the ledge of brake-checking them, sending the bike crashing into the back of my car, showing the rider that I can see them just fine.

I considered the possibility that the rider wasn’t directing the flashing lights at me specifically, but at my car. The idea made me feel a little better as soon as I thought of it: I am not my car. My car is not me. It could’ve been anyone behind the wheel. The biker had no idea who I was, just like I had no idea who they were. I felt better about the situation after convincing myself that it wasn’t personal.

Not content with feeling better, I started thinking about it more. It would’ve been easier for me to take it personally if I’d been outside of my car when they started flashing their lights. Of course, this is a meaningless hypothetical, since my person doesn’t possess the same killing power as my vehicle, but still: what’s the difference between me in a car and me in a body? I’ve convinced myself that I’m not my car, but it’s harder to recognize that I’m not my person either. It’s even harder for me to see that I’m not my brain, harder still to see that I’m not my consciousness, nor am I something subtler, deeper than that. None of these things constitute a “self,” so I suppose there’s no reason for me to feel offended when someone flashes their lights at my car or my person or even my consciousness.

When a stranger flashes their proverbial lights at me in the above ground, that’s not necessarily a reaction to all that I contain, but a generic response to someone who looks like me. When a friend flashes their lights at me in a conversation, that’s a response to the person I am to them. When someone who knows me extraordinarily well, someone who’s built up a pretty sophisticated concept of me in their mind, starts flashing their lights at me, this is when it starts to feel personal. Knowing what they know about me, and having come up with highly personalized ways of interacting with that version of “me,” whom they must think they know very well, they still decide to flash their lights. These are the interactions that bring me pause: they really think I don’t see them, even after all this time.

The point is, there is no fundamental self somewhere deep down inside me, and the flashing of the lights says more about the flasher than the flashee.

This has been the busiest year of my life. In this one weird year, I’ve interacted with more strangers than I have in my life, each with their own unique lights and flashing pattern.

I feel different now than I did at the beginning of the year. Talking to so many people about matters so intimate, things that would never, ever come up in a regular conversation (Does cancer run in your family? Do you think your partner is trying to coerce you into getting pregnant? What’s the connection between the voices you hear and the threat of harm being done to your loved ones?), is something that changes you whether you like it or not.

I really do feel like something has changed, even if I can admit that there’s no changeable “self” within me. I can’t tell what it is that’s changed. I think I’m still too close to the weird year to figure it out. Maybe I never will, and I’ll just go on with my life as this changed person, unaware of the differences between me now and me then.

I forgot where I was going with all this. That’s the difficulty with digressing. Sometimes I forget where I was before I digressed. The digression starts to feel like the path. I end up on a path that bears no resemblance to the one I was on. But isn’t that just how life goes? You take a turn down a side path, you have life experiences that you can’t really explain, you lose some things, you pick some things up, and then you come out transformed. Even if you find your way back to the original path, it won’t be the same. You digress.

The trouble is that when I’m alone on a path, I have to rely on the flashing of my own lights, but my lights have minds of their own, sometimes flashing at nothing in particular.

But now I’m really digressing. Forget about the biker and keep driving.