Bookshelves and selves

Lindsay and I took a weekend trip to Bellingham recently, and on a rainy Saturday, we ventured into downtown and found ourselves surrounded by ceiling high stacks and shelves at Henderson Books. The sheer amount of visual information is something to behold; post-it notes guide readers from one section to the next and the books were arranged in a very bespoke way that felt like the product of the store owner’s mind. I found several titles in the ‘books on writing’ section, which was sandwiched between linguistics and formal style guides, ala MLA and APA. I picked up a copy of Anne Lamott’s cheeky and wise Bird by Bird (my copy from college long lost to time and several moves) and a book on writing memoir that is also itself a memoir: Unreliable Truth by Maureen Murdock.

Image credit: Google Maps user Tara M

Like Lamott, Murdock teaches writing, memoir specifically, and the second half of her book offers guidance to those who wish to tell their story in this form. I appreciate what she has to say about writing and healing:

The fundamental premise of memoir writing is the belief in the restorative power of telling one’s truth…we never know exactly what heals a person, but the greatest healing may come in knowing that from our suffering we have comfort to offer each other and that we are not, in fact, alone.

I hope my book finds its way to people who are trying to make sense of cataclysm, the sort which makes no sense and upends what you thought before, about who you are, what you want out of life. I hope seeing a journey through suffering allows the reader to feel seen.

We lost track of time at the bookstore. Having so much knowledge in one place organized haphazardly must have bent the spacetime continuum ever so slightly. I wandered past the large section on Christianity and thumbed through titles on the Buddhism shelf - General Buddhism and Zen Buddhism, just below a large repository labeled “TNH”, Thich Nhat Hanh. I was looking for something quite specific and was quite confident I would find it there: a book on the Buddhist view of self, or rather the illusion of self, something similar to a title I’d finished recently, Andrew Olendzki’s Untangling Self.

I have become increasingly interested in the idea of non-self as it relates to life in general, and my story in particular. The journey this younger version of me is on is filled with moments of surprise and disappointment, confusion and alarm, when the expectation of who he should be - who he imagines himself as - collapses. I want to peer inside that pain and disillusionment and find a kernel of truth, which I think is something like this: there was no self there to begin with, no Platonic ideal to chase…you are constantly chasing and there is no self that mediates direct experience, that sits above it.

Mind you, I am not a philosopher or scholar, just an observer, writer, and curious person - but I find this view so elegant, despite being counterintuitive, radically so given the centrality of self in our language, culture, and so on. And when you say things like ‘transcend the notion of self’ or ‘the self is an illusion, a cause of suffering’, it can sound like frou-frou new age granola hippy crunch to some. The younger version of me would have been deeply skeptical, probably rejecting this concept out of hand, based mostly on icky vibes. Olendzki offers a simple way to understand this concept:

Self…is a projection of ownership onto all of experience (this is my body, these are my feelings, perceptions, formations, and this my consciousness).

When we cling tightly to our bodies, feelings, perceptions, emotional responses, and consciousness, considering them to be profoundly important, the outcome is the sand castle of the self, attended by behaviors that contribute to greater personal and collective suffering.

Almost all of the difficulties we face…are rooted in the fact that we are choosing to define ourselves as the owners of our experience and all that flows through it.

Over the course of the story, I learn to let go of attachment to the version of me that I had constructed in my mind, finding freedom and healing.

The book I found, near the bottom rung of the shelf was sheathed in archival book plastic but bore no stickers, stamps or other library-like markings. Losing Ourselves by Jay L. Garfield. Unlike Olendzki’s book - which is written in the voice of a Buddhist teacher and practitioner - Garfield’s contribution to the subject of self is straight-up academic philosophy. But I am up to the challenge of working through it; my hope is to add more depth and insight for my readers, and to understand this subject more. I am revising and editing with these ideas in mind.

This memoir project has taught me so much and thinking forward to the final draft, publication, all the rest - I am excited to share, to hear other stories, to learn, and be in the present moment. Thank you for reading and being here on this journey with me.