That Other Self, Who Watches

“And that other self, who watches me from the distance of decades,
what will she say? Will she look at me with hatred or with compassion,
I whose choices made her what she will be?” (Jane Hirshfield)

Remember her? She had tall boots and a short suede skirt. She favored tight ribbed turtleneck sweaters. She thought looking good was important, and she had that down. She rode the rails, and busses, even drove a car sometimes…a Gremlin that smelled a bit like rotting potatoes from the fifty-pound sack she’d placed in the back for traction and forgot about until spring thaw. But all that transport lacked a destination.

Decades have passed, and she’s been restive lately. She wants a little credit and attention. She wonders what I’ve done with what she set in motion. Will I claim her now? Or am I still ashamed?

There was so much discord, so much disappointment. The walls of that house could not contain its sorrows. I still have a letter in the trunk of painful remembrance in which my father wrote “Will you abandon me, and all of my encumbrances?” She did, that other self.

She left and she left and then loitered in unlikely places, all of them dismal. She hid inside a marriage for a while. She became a temp, a drop-out, a couch surfer before that was a term. Later, she rented a furnished room in a house in upstate New York, near a university that she didn’t attend, and she kept her door closed. One day she heard her flatmates talking about her, believing she was out. “What does she do?” they asked. “What does she actually do?”

It was a hard question to answer. She worked sometimes, but was mostly adept at quitting. Maybe she was taking time out, building momentum, waiting for a moment. She needed to think. In the meantime, she indulged in a few unhealthy distractions, but even while depressed and dormant, she was not self-destructive. She held something back. She longed for something different…was that so wrong? She was the lucky one, but she didn’t feel strong enough to carry the others. She was weighted down with love. Even in the dark she saw a shining called her life. Her only life.

She wonders now if I can perceive how brave she was, in her own strange way. She was putting things in order for me, wasn’t she? She meant no harm, but perhaps she wasn’t harmless. It’s hard to say. There were necessary desertions, and she left hurt and anger in her wake, trying to travel light––and don’t think that was easy. She made choices, that other self, the ancestor of the silver-haired one who is typing this now. She chose on my behalf. She was clumsy about it, and erratic, but the voices of the ones who needed her grew distant, and she hardened her heart in self-protection, and luck and instinct landed her in a pleasant kind of elsewhere.

“And what have you done?” she asks. “Are you proud of me now? Shall I be proud of you?”

“A few times, you stood on your head.
A few times, you chose not to be frightened.
A few times, you held another beyond any measure.
A few times, you found yourself held beyond any measure.” (Jane Hirshfield)

Is it brave to save yourself? Well, it’s brave, but not heroic.

“And who said you had to be heroic?”

I think that’s her asking.

But the situation seemed to call for heroism, or at least a kind of nobility that she did not possess. She fled–away, not to. She shook off the customary roles and designations, but had no Plan B. She traveled aimlessly, and returned with nothing. Ah, the places she went! Ridiculous, unglamorous places, but each one was an elsewhere.

She had lovely skin and thick dark hair, and she thought she always would. Men took her under raptor wings, instructed her and claimed her, only to discover she was trouble.

Is it enough to have finally settled someplace, made a home, done a little good here and there? And now a new year has come and with it the impulse to declare resolutions, to make sense and new beginnings. The one who loves and holds me beyond any measure suggests that I resolve to let go of all the regrets that haunt me, and once and for all move on. He doesn’t think I need to justify myself.

We’ve all gotten introspective, it seems. We’re all suspended in time, looking back at our lives. A girlfriend writes in a text: “We older ones always left, forging ahead–what else were we supposed to do? Story of my life…always leaving behind siblings, friends, lovers, a husband, to move on and save myself–a path littered with wreckage and ruins and dead bodies.”

It’s my story too, exactly, a text I could have written myself. This friend and I have been close for twenty-five years, and I never knew she felt this way. Maybe it’s time to get reacquainted with our previous selves, to shine a more grateful and forgiving light on them and hope it carries over.

But the “ancestor of my future happiness”, to use David Whyte’s term, is a tough one to understand. She wasn’t a fan of self-sacrifice, but she squandered opportunity and didn’t do anything worthwhile with the freedom she won by shirking duty. A queen of false starts, it wasn’t at all clear what her mission was when she finally set sail, or even if she’d keep on going.

And now she wants to know if we can finally be friends. She wants some small acknowledgement in the book of my life.

Today I got a letter from a former student…an old-fashioned letter written with a dip pen…in which she writes about the need to stoke her courage, and reinvent herself, and how apprehensive she feels, even while appearing undaunted. She’s in her thirties, and I love that I can metaphorically hold her hand and be someone she might look back upon as having been helpful.

Another long-ago student, a working cowboy who grew up on a local ranch and now lives in a Nevada mining town, wrote to me asking if I could recommend books on ancient history, heroes and Greek mythology. I am over-the-top delighted that he has chosen to contact his old sixth grade teacher, and I promptly ship him a collection of books to get started on. I remind him that he is on his own hero’s journey, and he should keep this in mind.

Also today, the leaves of the cottonwood trees were particularly yellow, sparkling like bright coins in the hazy sunlight. I am wearing an amber necklace, the same one that other self used to wear.

She must have laughed sometimes. She liked when new snow came, hushing and forgiving everything, turning the room blue in the morning, but she hated being cold. She liked diners and art deco buildings, blue grass music and Handel’s Messiah, and she missed her little brother. She had a few friends that her current self could contact right now if the whim struck. She was fond of lilacs, hoped to go to Italy someday, and believed that her real life was still ahead of her. I’m ever so grateful that she didn’t give up.