THE EROSION OF THE SELF

I

Picture the self in infancy. Your blurry childish form the first time it perceived light. As it dappled into your iris, perhaps you gurgled or merely squinted at its mystery. I wonder if you had any predilection towards a certain colour, even then. If colour preference can even constitute a part of the self? My mother said that the five of us each displayed traits that became our essentials at this age. So is the self born or made? Regardless, looking back at yourself, looking back to the days when you were nothing more than your mother’s child and nothing less than a smiling, barely perceptible, glimmer of life, somewhere along the way you now realise there was a smoothing and buffering as you came into contact with the world, as you surrendered to the abrasion of the words and feelings that came on as quickly as the wind.

II

You were always perceived as a quiet schoolchild, but your mother assures you that you weren’t always like that. And you see it in old photographs when you were unused to the camera’s eye, unlike now. Though maybe you did always prefer listening to talking? It began early, you think, the moulding, under the eyes of others. At first, you hadn’t cared, but now you wonder when you stopped letting your mother part your hair before school, stopped letting her pick out your clothes. You wonder now if the judgment of half-formed children rising to meet adolescence was that of themselves or others above them, perpetually falling down through the generations like unending summer rain, sticky with heat. Regardless, you are now aware that you hid parts of yourself, that parts of you were eroded as you were told what was right and what was wrong. Until finally, you were moulded into something almost tangible, something soft and smooth with rounded edges. You wonder if parts of you fully rotted away in their neglect. Maybe that’s why you became quiet, you think. However, even thinking is ironic to you—knowing anything, particularly regarding yourself, has never been your speciality.

III

What you find most strange is the erosion of the part of the self that knew it was natural, that knew it was grown from the soil. You were taught to feel contempt for the dirt with every washing of your hands. Worst of all, you began to see the monster of greed around you, to internalise it as it watched and waited for you, with an open mouth. You started to consume, eventually of your own accord, at the soil’s expense and were taught to keep doing so, even as the earth eroded away under your clean, clothed feet. The earth that taught you how to climb the trees it sprang around you. The earth that will take you back when you yourself erode away to nothing. Yet you separated it from yourself, discarded it with the items you throw away—clothes and phones and baskets of scribbled paper. You ascribed these items as being part of the self, forgetting the grass you used to lie in to watch the race of the clouds against the sky. The flowers you used to pick for your mother, whose breath taught you more of the world than nonentities of silicone and sterility ever could.

III

You also came to wonder, in horror, that other selves could be treated as something so fickle by those who ruled the world around you, like the queens and kings from the stories you used to hear, but negating any of their kindness or mercy. You were thankful but also ashamed that where, when, you were born meant you were protected. Each day, as you watched the news over your parents’ shoulders, you learned how the world bled. How the rivers became slick with oil and blood. You learned how lives were eroded to dust in the blink of an eye. Watched people you loved disappear into the night without a whisper of warning. You clung to the self you had left in the face of the brutality.

IV

You tried to find meaning in various definitions of selfhood. In Aristotle’s essentials or the proclamations of Descartes. When that confused you further, you turned to other things, hoping to find some ephemeral but crucial part of yourself in the fleeting heat of another’s arms, but you only ever found them to be cold and misleading, leaving you ever more distant. So, you turned outwards, to cold pews on Sunday mornings under stained glass windows in your pinafore dress beside your grandmother, but you couldn’t find yourself in religion either, despite what you’d been promised by the scriptures and sacraments fed to you on a child’s spoon and slipped in quietly alongside your school lunch. Instead, you turned to a different sort of worship, collecting around you the things that you thought you liked the most. You tried to peel your eyes and neurons away from the false idol of your screen. The screens that melted the colour from your face like disfigured, dripping plastic. Instead, you turned to the music, the literature, the friends, the plants to grow that made you feel most yourself. That made you feel like you were coming back, you were returning to the parts of you smoothed away by the ocean of life and its currents. Building a solid foundation in your bones like the housing shell of a hermit crab. You do still have a tendency to pick at old scabs left from cuts born of rocks on the sand, but you can now sit happily in your childhood friend’s bedroom as time warps around you, until you’re not quite sure if your footprints made it past the age of sixteen or if they will remain there forever.

V

But, just when you have found a self for you of words and music and art, you are told there is no more use for you. Perhaps you’d be better stripping away the self of you altogether—then you might be more useful? After all, the machine can do it for you now, think for you, write for you, almost breathe for you. Maybe you’d be better off becoming a machine to fight the machine. After all, a machine could face the brutality of the world unflinchingly. But instead, however stupid it may be, you resolve to continue like the mountains, you resolve to go back to the soil and await the weather that will bring the next landslide—the next erosion—knowing you have fought to bring back, fought to hold onto the self of you—however unknowable and amorphous it remains. Perhaps, you think, that’s what selfhood is to you now—

a holding on.