Two

I am trying to explain myself.  Not that I am anything particularly mysterious.  But just as I believe that every person is explicable, I believe that every person is worth explaining.  There are a few prominent, outstanding people who have other people enough interested in them that someone else does it, but most of us have to do it for ourselves if it is going to be done at all. The problem is that as I search my memory for what would account for the particular of what I am, and why my life went the way that it did, I find that nothing particular to me comes to mind.  I land on the most obvious truths about people in general.  That children will believe anything.  That young men are dominated by their desire for sex.  These blatant abstractions are what seem at all relevant, are all that come to mind. In looking for the concrete person that I actually am I am faced with an absence.

As a younger person I was a Cartesian when it came to self knowledge.  Everything about myself seemed transparent and immediate; there was nothing about my mind I could imagine to be hidden from myself.  And now I don't think I know myself any better than anyone else knows me.

But I'm not sure I really want to know.  People are very casual about the matter of exploring themselves, while I have come to believe it is a hazardous business.  Finding the truth about yourself can ruin you.  I'm not saying exactly that remaining in error about yourself is better, but you need to have your eyes open about what self-discovery can actually do to you.  It's not always a happy ending.

Imagine all the people you know who would be devastated if they had to admit the truth about themselves.  You're not all that different from them.

I discovered this during my second or third go-round with Alcoholics Anonymous.  They encourage a step-wise process of self-scrutiny meant to lead the alcoholic eventually out of his despair.  It wasn't that I was doing the steps,  there was never any real chance of that.  But I did for a while attend a weekly "step meeting" in which the twelve stages of the process were read aloud and discussed.   What courage it would take, I thought, to admit your wrongs to another person.  What courage to apologize to all the people you had harmed.  And it rubbed off to the extent that I actually began reflecting, perhaps not on my self as I am now, but on my past and the kind of person I have been, on how I actually lived my life.  

The outcome of this reflection was that I realized I had been a dangerous person, that I had been a danger, not to strangers or the community at large, but to the people who were close to me, the people who loved me.  I was a dangerous person to be close to.  I really think this was true, and that maybe it still is.  

But that way of putting it--"I have been a dangerous person"--was not the straightforward way of putting it, not the honest truth.  That I couldn't accept, at least not at first. Because the really honest way of putting it was not that I had been a dangerous person, but that I had been a bad person.

In trying to describe this thought that I arrived at I see that tense and aspect are the crux of the matter.  Whether we are speaking of something past or present, something completed or continuing.  These choices are fateful, not just because you want to get at the truth, but because it is very close to being maudlin, saying something like that, that you are a bad person.  But that is either what I am, or was, or what I have or had been.  

I think that I was only able to realize that about myself when seeing it could no longer be a shock.  It was just a slightly more conscious awareness of something I had suspected for a long time.  Guilt is like any handicap.  If you live with it for decades it's possible to gain a detachment from it, to see it from both sides--as something that you know will never leave you, but something too you know very well how to live with.