Dr Heather Lynn: «Кем ты себя возомнил?» — личное эссе об идентичности

Who Do You Think You Are?

Источник: https://drheatherlynn.substack.com/p/who-do-you-think-you-are

When I was growing up, I was told I would never be anybody. That I would never go to college. When I asked why, my mother told me people like us don't go to college. She said she would not pay for it. She said she could not afford it. She did not bother to say, "Yes, you can go to college, we will just have to figure out how," or "It will be hard, but it is not impossible.”

As a millennial, I come from a time where we were told we can do anything. It may seem pithy at first, but I still believe that, with an asterisk: you can do anything, as long as you are willing to do the work and accept the limitations.

A line often attributed to Rudyard Kipling says that if you did not get what you wanted, it is either because you did not want it badly enough, or because you wanted to bargain on the price. Often, we try to bargain on the price.

What is the price you are willing to pay to be what you want to be?

Kipling Painting by Philip Burne-Jones in The Granger Collection (1899). You don't have to pay at all. You can simply decide, "I don't want to go back to school. It's not worth it to me." Or, "I am not going to climb that career ladder. I would rather build something smaller and keep my evenings." Those are more than valid. Those are you asserting your own authority over your life. And if anyone comes around and says, "Well, you should have gone to college," or "you should have taken that promotion," you can say, "Yeah, thanks, but no thanks," and sit with that with no regrets, no insecurities, and be firm in your footing of who you are, not who you were told you would be.

The Inheritance What gives you the authority? You’re too big for your britches. You’re not good at math. You’ll never be…(fill in the blanks).

These messages can come from elementary school teachers, friends, and sadly, parents and family. Over time, we internalize those voices. The external voice becomes your internal voice.

Developmental psychology has documented the mechanism. Around eighteen to twenty-four months of age, infants begin to recognize themselves in mirrors. In the classic "rouge test," developed by Beulah Amsterdam in 1972 and rigorously studied by Michael Lewis and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn in their 1979 Social Cognition and the Acquisition of Self, a small dot of color is placed on a child's nose. Before about fifteen months, the child reaches for the dot on the mirror image, as if it were another baby. After about eighteen months, she reaches for the dot on her own face. She has recognized the image as hers. Lewis and Ramsay later showed, in a 2004 paper in Child Development, that this milestone is tightly correlated with the emergence of personal pronouns.

The child begins to say I and me at roughly the moment she can see herself in the glass. The capacity to see oneself and the capacity to name oneself appear together. Both depend on the right kind of social input arriving at the right developmental window. Where that input is withheld, as in the case of Genie, the girl discovered in Los Angeles in 1970 at the age of thirteen after years of isolation, whose linguistic development the UCLA researcher Susan Curtiss documented in her 1977 study Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day "Wild Child," the self never fully arrives. The same pattern shows up two centuries earlier in the case of Victor of Aveyron, the boy found in the forests of southern France around 1800 and studied for years by the physician Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard. Without the scaffolding of social input, the self does not assemble itself.

Identity is built from external structures, like teacher labels, job titles, social categories, and expectations. We inherit identities more than we choose them. When those identities crumble, due to a job loss, a professor who is no longer a professor, a parent after the child has grown or even passed away, identity collapses when the scaffolding is removed. If an identity is built on roles, then it is inherently fragile.

The question is, who are we?

Pirandello and the Hundred Thousand Selves When I was a professor, I used to give my students a written exercise that almost always broke the room open. The instruction was simple. Tell me who you are without using demographic identifiers. Do not tell me your age, your nationality, your race, your gender, your religion, or your political affiliation. Do not tell me your profession, your major, your hometown, or your marital status. No labels. No categories. Tell me who you are.

It was very difficult, but it led to some of the best conversations I have ever had in a classroom. Conversations about defining your identity on something other than the immutable or inherited characteristics by which we are constantly lumped together.

When you then say, “This is who I am,” the claim should be able to stand up to “why.” The Socratic questioning that follows should never bottom out at “because my mom said,” or “my dad said,” or “my teacher said,” or “my boss said,” or “anyone else said.”

Luigi Pirandello, in his last novel One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand, published in 1926, points out that identity fractures the moment we realize that every person who knows us carries a different version of us.

The protagonist, Vitangelo Moscarda, has his entire sense of self come apart when his wife casually mentions that his nose is slightly crooked, a detail he had never noticed in himself but which she had been seeing for years. From that small remark, the whole edifice begins to collapse. He realizes that the wife who loves him has been loving a man with a crooked nose he did not know existed, and that everyone else in his life is in love with, doing business with, or quarreling with, a different Vitangelo entirely.

There is the self we think we are, the self others think we are, and the countless selves that exist in the minds of everyone who has ever interpreted us. This dynamic has only accelerated in an age of curated online content, where most of the people forming opinions about you have never met you at all. The horror is not merely the fact that others misunderstand us. It is that we may also be living inside a misunderstanding of ourselves, placed there by others. Pirandello’s title names the three states the self moves between: one to itself, no one in absolute terms, and one hundred thousand in the minds of everyone who has ever encountered it. None of those numbers, you will notice, equals a stable self.

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Jaynes and the Voices of the Dead This is deeply ingrained in our psyche. In Julian Jaynes’ 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, he argued that before roughly 1000 BCE, human beings did not experience thought the way we do. The right hemisphere of the brain produced what we would now recognize as internal speech, and the left hemisphere received it as an external voice. Those voices were heard as gods, ancestors, and dead kings. Hammurabi did not think his laws. He heard Marduk dictate them. The Iliad is full of characters who do not deliberate so much as receive direct commands from the divine.

In the earliest ancestor-worshipping societies, the first gods were almost certainly remembered persons. The grandfather. The founding mother. The tribal elder whose voice had once filled the household, the hearth, or the meeting ground. When that person died, those who had known them carried their voice forward. The shaman, the priest, or the head of the lineage, who had heard the grandfather speak in life, could now relay what he was saying in death. I communed with him last night. He told me this. For the children of the community, who had never met the grandfather, that relayed voice was the only version of him they would ever encounter. The shaman became the conduit. The grandfather spoke through him, and the children grew up hearing the grandfather not as a story, but as a present, ongoing voice with opinions about how they should live.

This is what possession by the ancestors actually means, not metaphorically, but in a practical sense. You repeat what your grandfather used to say, and in that moment he is speaking through you. The voice that issues from your mouth is partly yours and partly his, and the parts cannot always be cleanly separated. Multiply that by every generation that came before you, by every authority who has ever shaped your speech, and you begin to see how much of what you think of as your own voice is the population of the dead, still talking through you, still issuing instructions about how you should live.

Jaynes’s thesis is contested among neuroscientists, but the cultural anthropology is harder to argue with. Every traditional society routes authority through the dead. The voice that tells you who you are usually belongs to someone whose body has been in the ground for a long time, transmitted through your grandmother, your mother, your teacher, and finally yourself. By the time you hear it, you cannot tell it apart from your own thinking.

Are you ‘possessed’ by anyone from your past? Did a teacher tell you that you are not good at math, and have you just accepted it as the case? Maybe they were not a good teacher. Maybe you were not studying hard enough. Maybe you did not understand that particular part of math. Does that make you inherently, forever, bear the identity of someone who is not good at math? I think not.

Jung and the Work of Recognition Carl Jung understood that the psyche is not made whole by pretending its pieces do not exist. He gave us the vocabulary that has shaped a century of depth psychology: the persona, the social mask we present to the world; the shadow, the disowned material we have buried because it was not safe to claim it; and individuation, the long, often painful work of bringing the rejected pieces back into conscious relationship with the rest of the self.

We become whole by recognizing the hidden, inherited, performed, and wounded parts of ourselves and bringing them into conscious realization. The goal is not to construct a perfect public identity, but rather to stop being governed by unconscious ones. Jung’s point, and it is a hard one to absorb, is that the parts of you that you most want to disown are usually the parts that have the most power over your life precisely because they are operating in the dark.

The voice saying “You cannot” is not wisdom or truth, but rather a memory. The voice saying “Stay in your lane” is not humility; it’s fear. The voice saying, “Who are you to speak? Are you qualified?” is not always discernment, but obedience to an authority that only you gave power to.

The Credentialism Layer When comedian Dave Smith went on Joe Rogan to debate Douglas Murray about the war in Israel, the exchange quickly became about more than the war itself. Smith was not presenting himself as a credentialed foreign-policy expert. He was speaking as a human being, a citizen, and a moral agent with ideas, questions, and a right to reason publicly. That distinction matters. He was not claiming institutional authority. He was exercising the older and more basic authority of conscience.

Douglas Murray, on the other hand, who does assert himself as an expert, called Dave out and asked if he had ever been to Israel. When Dave said no, Murray said, “You’ve never been.” It was very dramatic, and it became a cultural touchpoint.

We are tired of credentialism. People are allowed to say what they think. Not everything has to pass through the filter of scientism or whatever filtration system the gatekeepers are using this week. We have the freedom to speak our minds and to choose whose voices we hear.

This is not an argument against expertise. Expertise matters, and so do discipline and study. But credentialism is not the same as wisdom, and permission is not the same as truth. There is a difference between asking whether someone knows what they are talking about and asking whether they are socially authorized to speak in the first place. The first question protects standards. The second only protects an enforced hierarchy.

The childhood voice. The internalized identity. Social roles. External authority. Most people are living inside these boxes, these identities they did not consciously choose.

The Sculptor’s Instruction There is a passage in the third-century philosopher Plotinus, the Egyptian-born Neoplatonist whose Enneads shaped the contemplative traditions of late antiquity, the medieval Christian mystics, the Sufi mystics, and the Renaissance Hermeticists, that has stayed with me for years. He tells his reader, in Enneads I.6.9, to do something very particular when working on the self.

He says to become like a sculptor working on a statue that must become beautiful. Cut away what is excessive. Straighten what is crooked. Smooth what is rough. Brighten what is dark. Do not stop, he says, until the form that was always there underneath finally shines through.

The image is exact. The self is uncovered, not built up from nothing. You are not adding pieces. You are removing what was added to you by people who did not have the right to add it. The teacher who said you were not good at math. The mother who said people like us don’t go to college. The voice that said stay in your lane. None of those are the figure underneath. They are sediment, accumulated over time, hardened by repetition until they seem like part of you. They are not. They can be removed.

Plotinus was working in a much older tradition. Above the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, in letters worn smooth by centuries of pilgrims, were two words: γνῶθι σεαυτόν. Gnōthi seauton. Know thyself. That inscription is the question the entire Western contemplative tradition has been trying to answer ever since. Notice what it does not say. It does not say construct thyself. It does not say defend thyself. It does not say credential thyself. The instruction was to know the thing already there, the figure under the stone you did not put there.

That is the same instruction. Know thyself and who do you think you are are the same question asked in two different ways. One is the invitation and the other an accusation. The work of a life is to convert the second back into the first.

The Trance On the first day of class, I would welcome my students and tell them who I was. I would read out a long list of academic credentials in a deliberately flat, slightly hypnotic monotone, so that the accomplishments would land as background noise. The expected register. Of course she has those. She is the professor.

Then I would attempt to break the trance by saying: not bad for a sixteen-year-old runaway who left poverty, was homeless, was kidnapped, assaulted, and told she would never be anybody. They would sit up in their chairs. Then I had their attention.

I would go on to tell a modified and appropriate version of my personal story. About how I, too, started at a community college. And I would say to them: I am not telling you these things to sound heroic, or to impress you. I am telling you these things so that you know that:

“No matter how bad things get, no matter how many barriers you may encounter, and no matter how easy it seems just to give up, persistence and education can transform you from the person you are told you are into the person you want to be.”

It is never too late to discover who you are, but it does take courage and work.

That is what I wanted my students to understand. Not that life is fair or that every wound becomes a gift. Not that everyone begins from the same place or pays the same price. Only that the voices that named you are not always the voices that know you. At some point, you have to decide which ones still get to speak.

Who do you think you are?

I will see you on the path. 🕯️

—Heather

Stepping into a new day. Not “love and light.” Not “doom and gloom.” Just Tradition.

Further reading: Luigi Pirandello, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand, the William Weaver translation. Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Susan Curtiss, Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day "Wild Child" (Academic Press, 1977). Michael Lewis and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Social Cognition and the Acquisition of Self (Springer, 1979). C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious and Aion, volumes 9i and 9ii of the Collected Works. Plotinus, The Enneads, the Stephen MacKenna translation or the newer Lloyd Gerson edition from Cambridge. Pierre Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life remains the best introduction to the contemplative practices of late antiquity, including the Neoplatonic tradition of self-sculpture that Plotinus inherited and refined.

Dr. Heather Lynn is a historian tracing the occult architecture beneath modern power. She is the creator and host of The Midnight Academy podcast and the author of five books, including her forthcoming book, Codex Machina: How AI Is Decoding Ancient Civilizations, Technologies, and Lost Languages in Our Search for Meaning. Find her at drheatherlynn.com.