The Observer and the Observed
On possible selves and the one in the mirror
Whom amongst us hasn’t succumbed to the idle fantasy (or tortured longing) for what may have been possible? Who hasn’t mourned the selves we lost, the people we could’ve, would’ve, should’ve been, had everything turned out exactly as we hoped for?
A few weeks ago, I wrote about rejection and how the sting of not being chosen has everything to do with the stories we tell about ourselves to the person in the mirror and the world at large. This week, I’ve been thinking about choice, and specifically the idea that:
every choice we make both opens a window of opportunity and closes the door to a million different possibilities. Ruminating on the past or dreaming of the future too hard keeps me from seeing what is happening now. It makes me forget that the only thing I have a modicum of control over is: how I respond to this present moment.
It could be a vaguely fun thought exercise to imagine who we could’ve been in a different, easier world, but it might be even more fun to start thinking about what these versions of our selves are telling us about who we are now. If you find yourself saying “Well, it must be nice to make art all day when you don’t have mouths to feed,” or “In a different life, I was born to be an opera singer” or something along those lines, it might be time to spend ten minutes of your day actually drawing or singing.
All those versions of you that you wish existed
are crowded around the mirror
waiting for you to pay attention.
The notion of An Other You is common across folklore and pop-culture and is an idea I’ve been obsessed with since I first watched Drew Barrymore in Doppelganger (a film that was of its time, read kitsch and problematic on many levels). A more fascinating version that I encountered in recent years is the Fetch, or according to Irish folklore (and best mystery writer in the world, Tana French), a likeness of you that you must never see, because once you do, one of you must die.
This very version of Now and Zen, not an evil twin, was featured in the weekend edition of Mid Day, which called the newsletter you are reading “heartwarming, candid and real”.
This week I will be at Zeg Fest in conversation with journalists Rachel Corp, Claudia Milne and Shazna Nessa about Legacy Media in the age of AI — i.e. will big media survive? I shall keep you posted.
I will also be speaking with literary agent Patrick Walsh on How to Sell a Book and interviewing the author Yaroslav Trofimov on his excellent book about Ukraine.
More soon.
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