The question "If I were myself"

Sometimes I make some exercises of abstraction. For example, when I meet someone interesting and I know the person is going to check my facebook profile, I ask myself: "if I were someone else (or that person, in particular) checking out my facebook profile, what would I think?". Or, when I am writing a text, I try to look at it and think "if someone would read it, what would his/her feelings or reactions be?"; I am probably doing it now, when writing this text.

Some of these exercises can be rather foolish, as the first example I gave. While others might be useful; trying to put yourself in the shoes of the reader and anticipate the reactions can help you to shape your text, for example. But most of them come down to the same question at one point or another: "what is the impression I am making here?";  or alternatively: "would I make a good impression or not?". 

Making good impressions feels good for our ego, and most of us like it. And, this is becoming something increasingly central and problematic in our increasingly virtual world. 

But making good impressions is not something that we can only do on other people. We can try to make good impressions on ourselves as well; and we probably do it a lot more than we imagine. We do it when we refuse to visit the darkest places of our souls; we do it when we protect ourselves from our most frightening pains. We do it when we refuse to accept our humanity and our lack of character. We do it when we think "I feel that there are things inside me that is better not to find out", as a friend of mine told me once. We do it when we refuse to answer the question "if I were myself" - a question that goes in the other direction than the question "if I were someone else" from the beginning of the text.

"If I were myself" is an invitation to a world of freedom; an invitation to the unknown; an invitation to reconciliation with our best, and with our worst; an invitation to get to know our joy and our pain; an invitation to experience the world,  with its joy and pain. It is NOT the "cheap freedom" of acting according to our instincts with no consideration about ourselves or others.  It is a lot deeper and more meaningful than that kind of "freedom".

But I will let someone else speak further about this question in my place. Someone that can talk about human feelings with enormous talent and sensibility:  Clarice Lispector (1920-1977), an internationally acclaimed  Brazilian writer, and one of my favorite ones. The title of the text is "Se eu fosse eu" ("If I were myself"), and I would recommend you to read it in Portuguese. But for those who do not speak Portuguese, I have made an attempt to translate it (after looking, with no success, for an official translation on the internet). My translated text is of course far from reflecting the quality of the original text; but you can, at least, get some of the message.

Se eu fosse eu / If I were myself

Quando eu não sei onde guardei um papel importante e a procura revela-se inútil, pergunto-me: se eu fosse eu e tivesse um papel importante para guardar, que lugar escolheria? Às vezes dá certo. Mas muitas vezes fico tão pressionada pela frase "se eu fosse eu", que a procura do papel se torna secundária, e começo a pensar, diria melhor SENTIR. 

When I do not know where I put an important document / piece of paper and the search turns out to be useless, I ask myself: if I were myself and if I had to put an important document somewhere, what place would I choose? Sometimes it works. But many times I become so impressed with the sentence “if I were myself”, that the search for the document becomes secondary, and I start thinking... or better said: I start feeling.

E não me sinto bem. Experimente: se você fosse você, como seria e o que faria? Logo de início se sente um constrangimento: a mentira em que nos acomodamos acabou de ser movida do lugar onde se acomodara. No entanto já li biografias de pessoas que de repente passavam a ser elas mesmas e mudavam inteiramente de vida. 

And I do not feel well. Try it yourself: if you were yourself, how would you be and what would you do? It feels embarrassing yet at the beginning: the lie in which we accommodated ourselves has just been removed from the place where it had accommodated itself. However, I have already read biographies of people that have suddenly become themselves and have changed their lives completely.

Acho que se eu fosse realmente eu, os amigos não me cumprimentariam na rua, porque até minha fisionomia teria mudado. Como? Não sei. 

I think if I were really myself, my friends would not greet me in the streets, because even my appearance would have changed? How? I don't know.

Metade das coisas que eu faria se eu fosse eu, não posso contar. Acho por exemplo, que por um certo motivo eu terminaria presa na cadeia. E se eu fosse eu daria tudo que é meu e confiaria o futuro ao futuro. 

Half of the things I would do if I were myself, I cannot tell. I think, for example, that for a certain reason I would end up locked in a jail. If I were myself I would give everything I own away and I would trust the future to the future.

"Se eu fosse eu" parece representar o nosso maior perigo de viver, parece a entrada nova no desconhecido. 

“If I were myself” seems to represent our biggest danger in life, it seems the new entrance to the unknown.

No entanto tenho a intuição de que, passadas as primeiras chamadas loucuras da festa que seria, teriamos enfim a experiência do mundo. Bem sei, experimentaríamos emfim em pleno a dor do mundo. E a nossa dor aquela que aprendemos a não sentir. Mas também seríamos por vezes tomados de um êxtase de alegria pura e legítima que mal posso adivinhar. Não, acho que já estou de algum modo adivinhando, porque me senti sorrindo e também senti uma espécie de pudor que se tem diante do que é grande demais

However, I have the feeling that, after the first so-called delirious of the party that it would be, we would finally be able to experience the world. And I know, we would finally experience the pain of the world in its plenitude. And our own pain, the one we learn how not to feel. But, now and then, we would also be taken by an ecstasies of pure and genuine joy that I can barely imagine. I think that I am already guessing why I found myself smiling and also felt a kind of "pudeur"/modesty that you feel when you are before what is extremely large.

Text of Clarice Lispector (free translation by Eduardo Costa)

Figure from: http://mood.com.br/revista/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/clarice.jpg