The Future of the Self E-Book

Joanna Nadin

• Herausgeber: Melville House UK
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: FUTURES
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 104

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Look in the mirror – what do you see? We all feel, instinctively, that self exists. That somewhere inside us, under the clothes, the make-up and self-tan, lurks a hard 'pearl', a kernel of truth called 'me'. And it's big business uncovering that 'authentic' kernel. It's also a fool's errand, because that 'true self'? It doesn't exist. Self is no more than a story we tell ourselves. It's mutable, pliable as Plasticine. Worse, it's not even strictly autobiographical, but co-authored with those around us. And as such, there is no one version, but myriad, and the number is growing as we are exposed to ever more connections. We are already seeing the effects travel, television, and celebrity culture can have on the formation of self, but as digital and social media exposure grows, and in the advent of AI, what will happen to our sense of self? Can we become ever more multiple and adapt better to our globalised world? Or will we dissolve into narcissitic, detached 'nobodies'?

Leseprobe

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Contents

Title PagePART 1: The Backstory of SelfPART 2: Future SelfThe ‘Nobody’The ‘Everybody’Self ReflectionsFurther ReadingAbout the SeriesAuthor’s AcknowledgementsCopyright

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PART 1

The Backstory of Self6

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A caveat

Before we begin, a disclaimer.

I’m not a psychologist or neuroscientist, nor even a philosopher. Yes, I have a PhD in the nature of self, but in relation to young adult (YA) literature; I’m not the kind of doctor who is useful on an aeroplane. I’m a novelist and sometime speechwriter. I mostly let others do the hard work of research, then, like a gold digger, I pan their insightful, if sometimes dry, findings for the shiny stuff that I can turn into a story or a soundbite. And that is, effectively, what I’m doing here. I’m pressing the work of greater minds than mine into service to tell the story of self – where it is now, and where it might be heading. And, most importantly, why that matters.

This story, though, is unlike any others I’ve conjured. It straddles several genres, from sixties psychedelia to coming-of-age tale to dystopian scifi. There’s no clear inciting incident, but a plethora of changes that have all played a part. It also opens with a single, mostly likeable protagonist – our hero, the ‘true self’. But, while I won’t spoil the story by telling you if they survive or not, I will admit that we end in a potentially infinite crowd scene. There is, though, redemption of sorts, and I may have thrown in a couple of dragons along the way for effect. 8

So, sit back and enjoy the ride, as I take you on a quest not just to slay those dragons, but to find your own future self.

A ‘self’ obsession

It is summer 1978, the evening air still redolent with overheated tarmac, the mint-green Tupperware beaker of water next to my bed tainted by a residue of orange squash and plastic. Downstairs the grown-ups are discussing someone called Margaret Thatcher, who looks and sounds worryingly like my Aunty Peggy (a woman I would not want in charge of anything, given her ban on children in the drawing room and inclusion of fishpaste sandwiches at high tea). But up here, rigid under a garish duvet cover, the eight-year-old me has more important matters to mind. She has just, in what will be her first epiphanic moment, realised the sheer incredibility of her existence as a tangible, singular being. There can’t be that many people in the world, she thinks. A thousand, maybe; two thousand at most. So, the very fact she is on earth at all seems almost impossible to comprehend and renders her definitely ‘special’. But what is troubling her is not how she came to be, but what she will come to be. For, if there are so few people alive at all, the self she is had better be a good one. But what is her ‘self’? 9

She knows what her mother thinks it is.

‘There are pretty girls, and there are clever girls, Joanna. You are a clever girl.’

Being clever is important, she thinks. But she would like to be pretty too. And more. She would like to be funny, sassy, ingenious. More specifically, she would like to be George in the Famous Five, or the eponymous Heidi, or, whisper it, Cinderella – a name that tends to elicit sighs from her mother (something to do with excessive dresses and possibly false expectations of men). In any case, she had better get on with choosing her ‘self’ quick; she needs to pick one and stick to it, because it is only one we get after all, isn’t it?

And so begins what will turn out to be a long and arduous journey to find a better self. First, I don the mantles of the various inhabitants of Malory Towers – practical Darrell with her flashes of anger, which feel all too familiar; class joker Alicia; quiet but courageous Mary-Lou. (Though never Gwendoline Mary – I’m clever, not pretty, remember?) Then, when I have outgrown the pages of Blyton, I progress to Dickens and du Maurier (Who doesn’t want to run off with smugglers? I reason) before, somewhere around the age of fifteen, emerging, blinking, from the dim-lit aisles of the library to 10pick models from the ranks hanging around outside the sixth form common room – a New Romantic, a Goth, a psychobilly carrying a King Kurt single like a talisman, its Woolworth’s sticker intact.

Next, what feels like a decade behind everyone else, we acquire a VHS player (our nearest cinema is an unbreachable thirteen miles away) and I begin to imagine myself on the silver screen: Andie in Pretty in Pink – the girl literally from the wrong side of the tracks who wins the heart of the rich kid with her outlandish dress sense and love of vinyl. Baby in Dirty Dancing who gets to save the world, as well as dance the cha-cha-cha with Patrick Swayze. Literally anyone from Mystic Pizza – Jojo who shares my name (a sign, right?), my temper, and my suspicions that marriage is a swizz; Daisy who (again) wins the heart of the rich kid but also bests him at pool; bookish babysitter Kat who falls for the father of her charge (I know, I know – unthinkable now, but in my defence it was the 1980s and I was a teenager, and a fool).

Later, I change career with determination and frequency: actress, circus trainee, radio newsreader, political adviser. These are guises I try out for size, all the while terrified that what I fear is my ‘true’ self – the smart but plain one my mother has painted me 11as – will out. But still this does not stop me, because, helpless, I march to the mantra in my head that beats out the question ‘Who am I?’

Inevitable, then, or it seems so to me, that I will turn this obsession, and quick-change ability, into a career.

I admitted at the beginning that I’m a novelist. More specifically, for many years I was known as a writer of young adult fiction, my stock-in-trade sending countless adolescents on quests to find their ‘one true self’. To work out not what they want to do, but who they will be when they leap, like Holden Caulfield, from the fields of rye of childhood over that cliff into the unknown but presumably dull or dystopian landscape of ‘being a grown up’. I dealt, frequently and unashamedly, in cheap metamorphosis scenes. You know the ones: Olivia Newton-John goes from Grease’s goody-two-shoes, swing-skirted Sandra Dee to leather-clad Sandy, stubbing out a cigarette with the toe of her red stiletto (Tell me about it, Stud). Ally Sheedy gets the Molly Ringwald treatment at The Breakfast Club, taking her from allegedly repellent dandruff-ridden emo to Emilio Estevez’s personal cheerleader. Art geek Laney Boggs takes off her glasses and suddenly She’s All That and Freddie 12Prinze Junior is hanging around for more than a bet, hair improbably gelled and tongue lolling.

God, how the teenage me had longed for this to happen. To go from brittle, beige chrysalis to Technicolor butterfly. And, God, how I’d tried. I’d started young, of course, with the contents of a well-stocked dressing-up box. Clothed in leftover hessian from one of my mother’s many craft projects, I would quickly don a cardboard crown when my fairy godmother – a conscripted but willing little brother – transformed me into the princess I longed to be. When hormones set in and I acquired a second-hand stereo, my gaze turned to musical chameleons Bolan and Bowie. I wanted them and I wanted to be them – to have that confidence to cast off suburban or working-class childhood through clothes, make-up and a change of name. At seventeen I fell for Frank N. Furter and The Rocky Horror Show’s exhortation ‘don’t dream it, be it’, escaping small-town Essex for Friday nights at the Prince Charles cinema off Leicester Square, along with hundreds of other wannabes and wish-they-weres dressed up for the singalong version of the film.

Makeover television offered up more fodder. As an eleven-year-old I had longed to sit on the hot pleather banquette in the window of Hair By Us and watch 13the Essex girls being permed, bobbed and blow-dried. I daren’t ask my mother to be allowed this treat for fear of sounding ‘weird’ or ‘lesbian’ (the worst insults I could imagine at that point; now, of course, badges of honour). But in my twenties I found myself free to take in such transformations at leisure, and in private. Shows like Ten Years Younger, What Not to Wear and The Swan depicted ugly ducklings like me being transformed, all building up to that ‘mirror moment’ when their new look would be revealed and they (and we) would gasp in delight.

The problem was I had a horrible sense that, like the clock striking midnight casting Cinderella back in rags, or the curtain being drawn back in Oz to reveal a withered facsimile of a wizard, someone would switch on a light and my ‘true self’ – the merely clever girl – would be revealed.

Hadn’t it already?

Jump back again to 1984 and my first village disco. It is an auspicious occasion, heralded by furtive whispers in class and a slew of phone calls in which my friend Ruth and I ascertain which boys will be there, and which might deign to snog us on the dance floor (or do more in the toilets or outside 14in the phone box). But if I am going to be kissed (or more) I need to look the part, and that means make-up, and something more daring to wear than jeans and a hand-me-down Burton’s shirt from Peter Marsh over the road (the shame!). And so I fashion myself a transformation. Wearing a kilt rolled up into a miniskirt, a school shirt with the collar cut off and new pink buttons sewn on, a slick of all-the-rage hypothermic Boots 17 ‘Twilight Teaser’ on my lips, I tread down the rough-carpeted stairs of our 1970s estate home with all the fear and anticipation of my longed-to-be Cinderella awaiting judgment from the wicked stepmother. My own actual mother, while not exactly wicked, is a harsh critic.

‘What on earth do you think you look like?’

I stutter out an ‘I don’t know’ to be met with what, to me, amounts to eternal damnation.

‘You look absurd. You’re not that sort of girl. You don’t look like you.’

And the scene ends, as it invariably did, with my ‘wiping that stuff off and putting something more sensible on’.

I didn’t want to believe it. But if my mother had said it, then surely it had to be true? These clothes weren’t ‘me’. Make-up was just a pathetic attempt to cover glaring ‘truth’: nothing more than Lewis 15Carroll’s Duchess putting clothes on a pig and pretending it was a baby. The lesson was clear: I should learn to accept who I am.

And so, despite the brief thrill of the makeover, that is what my YA books taught: a form of self-acceptance. Like so many writers before me and after, I exhorted my heroines to ‘just be yourself’ and to revel in the original ‘true’ version. Which, I wondered, was worse though: promising a potentially doomed fairytale transformation or forcing someone to ‘stay in their lane’?

Cut to 2014, and I’m in the early stages of drafting the novel that will form part of my doctoral thesis – a sort of Mean Girls meets Heathers meets The Riot Club. And, as I prepare to tell yet another heroine to ‘accept herself’ I begin to ask questions:

Why should they, or I for that matter, accept ourselves if we don’t like the selves we’re currently inhabiting? After all, these may be ones we’ve inherited, in terms of class or genetics, and might not feel like ‘me’ at all.

Why have my own changes of appearance, as well as career – a veritable Cher Horowitz revolving wardrobe in Clueless – been dismissed by friends and acquaintances as something unsavoury or 16untrustworthy, as ‘insincere’ in the mould of Dorian Gray, or, once by a fellow politico, as ‘Mitty-like’?

Why, ultimately, do any of us have to have a ‘true self’ at all?

I got the answers, at least at first, from another novelist.

A friend of a more-than-friend, I am introduced to novelist Emily Mackie in a Bristol café and manage to stammer out an elevator pitch.

‘It’s about the quest for identity,’ I say. ‘You know, the usual. “Be yourself”, “find yourself”. The whole Disney, high-school-movie thing. Only …’ Was I going to admit it? I was. ‘I’m going in circles. Like the whole thing’s a trick, a wild goose chase.’

Mackie nods and I feel the thrill of validation like a blood rush. ‘It’s bogus,’ she says. ‘There is no “self”.’