My Symphony of Selves

I’m reading this book, Your Symphony of Selves, by James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber. I met Jordan in an online chat room (no, not that kind), and he asked if he could send me a copy of his book. He said he thought I’d enjoy it. I’ll say I’m enjoying it!

In fact, I’m loving it. No way Jordan could have known this in advance, but it’s a comforting book for me to read after my five marriages, two birth and step- children, three businesses, foster parenthood, technology fascination, and now online life running the weekly Karma Club on the app Clubhouse. The book’s premise is that we are not always a single person, and thus it is indeed mentally healthy to have several selves that appear at different times in our lives.

Thank goodness somebody finally gave me permission to be myselves! I’ve spent my life trying to make sense of the different personalities that have shown up for me over the years, because I thought there was something wrong with them (us).

The earliest I remember thinking I had several distinct selves was in elementary school, when I created an imaginary life helping people who were suffering from an illness I also made up. The whole thing was a fantasy that I used as a story to put myself to sleep at night, but for about five years it was exceptionally real to me. I had a special power to restore my loved ones to health.

In school it became even clearer to me that I was several people: a really good student, a voracious reader, an overweight girl desperate to be popular, and a daughter equally desperate for her parents’ attention.

By the time I graduated from college, I knew I needed therapy, because I had panic attacks that sent me to the Cornell Clinic and made it necessary for me to sit in the back of the class so I could “escape” if I became too claustrophobic. I was already in fight or flight most of the time.

Sure enough, the German-Jewish Central Park West analyst my parents sent me to spotted my several selves. As she tried to tell me, she knew I was not an integrated personality because I kept on changing the way I wore my hair! This to her was a form of mental illness, and one day she told me I had to decide on an image and stick to it. I laughed in her face.

This was at the beginning of the 60s, and I thought she was ridiculous. But in reading “Your Symphony of Selves” I found out that during the middle of the 20th century most psychiatrists were still striving to help patients integrate their separate selves. Only later did the field begin to study separate selves and admit that they could be healthy. And only through psychedelics were people able to reveal some of their “alters.”

But realistically, why did we expect one single identity to navigate 70+, 80+, or 90+ years of life?

How could I be the same person I was when I moved to Arizona? Shouldn’t it be natural to be changed by 58 years of life experience?

Fadiman and Gruber’s central premise is that having multiple “selves” isn’t a disorder or a flaw; it’s a healthy, natural psychological reality. As I look back on myself and the life I created, I can see that different parts of me were always surfacing in response to different moments.

I’m not saying everyone is like me. Some people live relatively static lives anchored to fixed roles, places, or routines. My two best women friends are both in long marriages —over fifty years each. The same guy for fifty years! How can you even judge if yours is a good marriage? You have nothing to compare it with.

Of course I am being snarky when I say that, but I’m also the girl who walked away from a professorship without even another job to go to, folded her public relations firm out of boredom, and sold her tech marketing company to Intel because her (final) husband suggested she should get a job and a dependable paycheck and then walked out of Intel after a year because it was “not a good fit.”

I’m pretty sure my peripatetic life was driven by curiosity, a low tolerance for boredom, and enough faith in myself to think I’d probably always land on my feet. I always do, because there’s always a self to rise to every occasion.