Sense of Self

I had a fairly shitty day today, though I guess it started last night. These feelings have been building for a while, but just recently I've come to doubt my own character and integrity in a fundamental way. It's scary that I might not be the person I thought I was. That the people who know me might not consistantly tell me what they really think or that I might not listen when they do. I feel like I'm walking blind through the world, like I'm throwing out signals using technology I don't understand, and that I've never heard my messages played back.

This current perceived lack of self-awareness has made me interested in something I saw today on Boing Boing. To quote: "Since 1955, Jerry Davidson has obsessively written down everything he does during the day: visits to the store, telephone calls, meals, sex. Davidson has an impenetrable code, involving abbreviations and multiple colors of inks. A star on the top of a page means Jerry had a good day. Davidson never writes in the first person though, always in the third. He takes himself out of his experiences. His life is raw data."

I think this would be fascinating: to see myself through the data of my life. Of course, I would never create opinions of myself based solely on this data, but it could very well show me trends I normally don't perceive. It would be a way to look at myself through another filter, another lens, and would add to my collected knowledge of myself.

I would also be interested in other methods of developing self-awareness.

The lexicon and paradigm of sociolinguistics is slowly leaking into my life. Eli mentioned earlier today that a Spanish announcement on the bus didn't sound very announcementy, and my mind jumped to wondering about differences between unmarked speech in the register of announcements between Spanish-speaking and English-speaking speech communities. In this case I think it was just a poor recording, but I'm pleased that that's where my mind went. Maybe I'm actually getting a handle on this stuff after all.