Losing My Self in I.S.

continued …

The most turbulent days were the ones spent agonizing over my role in the project. I had swaggered into my I.S. with the notion that, sure, I can write about myself. Piece of cake. Indeed, the personal narrative sections were certainly the most enjoyable to produce; they allowed me to indulge in a creative, conversational style of writing — a welcome break from the academic tone I’d painstakingly cultivated for the past three years. What continued (and continues) to nag me, however, was the way in which my own childhood and upbringing influenced me as a reader, writer, and thinker.

Working on each chapter of I.S. was like walking down a hallway of mirrors — and not always the flattering kind. It did not help matters that I was also grappling with these differing formulations of selfhood — the coherent, unified self versus the fragmented, shifting one. I felt very fragmented. My inability to grasp a certain concept or, sometimes, my immediate fondness for a particular passage, spoke volumes about my own identity, about my specific location in the world. I couldn’t read or write anything without confronting an abundance of introspective whatnot: memories as they surfaced, then intersected, collided with, or broke apart from the three dog-eared autobiographies on my desk.

This endeavor, I realized, after it was too late to change topic, had the risk of sending me backwards, flailing, into my own (unwritten) autobiography, into a paralysis brought on by too much introspection. At the same time, the very real demand for a finished project did not allow for complete immersion. To borrow a quote from Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood, “I was beginning the lifelong task of tuning my own gauges. I was there to brace myself for leaving. I was having my childhood. But I was haunting it, as well, practically reading it, and preventing it. How much noticing could I permit myself without driving myself round the bend?”

My mother, I think, sensed my worry. She sent me a package in February containing, among other things, a bottle of Dr. Soothwell’s Nerve Tonic and a glittery Hallmark card emblazoned with the heading “What is Inner Strength?” It was the sort of card you’d send to someone who had just lost a family member or been diagnosed with a serious illness. My gallows humor got the better of me; I hadn’t laughed that hard in months.

I went home for spring break and calmed down. I printed off everything, spread every page out in a grid across the dining room floor, and pulled myself up to a bird’s-eye view, or at least a 5’5’’ human one. Before I had been an ant, crawling miserably between the rows of sentences. I gradually replaced my desire for a spectacular finished project with the quieter understanding that, had anything noteworthy taken place, it was the process that led me to question and destabilize my own way of being in the world and thinking about it. In a sense, I wrote my way through my own coming of age.

When I told a friend that I was one of the students speaking at the I.S. banquet in May, she asked that I not say anything too sentimental like “Independent Study changed my life,” or “I.S. allowed me to find myself.” I laughed. If anything, this yearlong project succeeded in ripping everything I once thought permanent out from under my unsuspecting feet — a tablecloth whisked out from under a china place setting. Only trained professionals can perform that trick without breaking anything. “I.S. didn’t do that,” I told her, “it ruined my sense of self entirely. I don’t think I even have a self anymore!” What I do have, however, is a bottle of nerve tonic and the giddy satisfaction that comes from being finished.

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