You Can't See Your Own Face
on the self as inherently distributed
I can’t see my own face.
When I face the mirror, I don’t see the real me: supposedly the vibrant, sometimes vicious, or vulnerable me(s) that my friends know. In the reflection, I’m more of a predictable doll than anything else, fully in control of which future expressions that I’ll make and not as a living, spontaneous moments that my friends enjoy.
I cannot, by the virtue and destitution of my first-person perspective, see myself out-of-body as someone whose eyes light up when they crack a funny line, not as someone whose body is subtly drawn to them when they signal the start of a petty gossip. They see me in many such motion!
User @justalexoki said:
every person you love has a version of you in their head that is slightly wrong. when you die, that's all that's left of you, dozens of distorted echoes, none of them truly you, just fragments warped by their own biases and memories. you will never be truly known
But this is exactly how foolish Narcissus was. Again: his dazzling expressions were never the ones reflected in the still water, but those that erupted among friends in moments-in-the-wild. He could never savor himself the way others have truly delighted.
okay this much is obvious, but pulling on this thread a bit more: if there is a supposedly real version of me or you, where is it located in?
Because my internal narrative isn’t consistent, nor objective. It’s bound through some deep threads/structure that I can’t fully see (i.e., saṅkhāra) and there are chapters of my life that others fondly remember but I don’t: heartfelt conversations, gestures of support in moments of need, etc. Who am I to assign an objective value for each event, such that A is worth more to remember than B?
And my friends’ memories aren’t inherently less authentic b/c each version of me (there are lots of versions of me in each of their minds, probabilistically and temporally) really exists in its own perfection, like variations in a Bach fugue. Each true to its own inner logic, each true to the viewpoint and the amusement—or horror—of the view-owner.
how else would we define a subjective relational experience, except from the viewpoint of its participants?
There’s a materialist angle: humans can only store a limited number of experiential fragments. The present is so 4K HD that even closing the eyes a second later won’t reproduce what we just saw in its entirety. Every reconstruction is flawed.
If I do remember the moments that stuck, maybe b/c they felt emotionally salient, or stored by chance, or echoed something within a private inner story in the making. Those amalgamations are then reshaped over time and have their edges softened by convenience.
Anyway, all this to say: we can’t see our own face and by extension, the self we carry in our minds are never the whole story. Maybe that’s not a flaw. Maybe the self was never meant to be a singular, coherent entity. maybe we were always meant to be distributed across time and through other minds, refracted like light through moving water. My continuity is contingent on small little things: trivias, gestures, experience that are saved and replayed in the strange, biased, loving compressions of people’s minds, which includes mine.
Maybe that’s why sometimes it feels electric to be seen b/c for a moment, the versions align i.e., the one I think I am, the one they perceive, the one I’m trying to become, and maybe sometimes others; a little harmonic convergence across subjective time.
and then it passes, but it leaves an afterglow. Maybe that’s the closest thing we get to a unified selfhood: a beautiful shimmer that happens when experiences briefly cohere.