Identity & Sense of Self — Martin Alderton

What it can feel like

A life that looks like a life, lived slightly to one side of you.

A man stands beside a hanging coat whose unsupported empty sleeve holds his keys from its hollow cuff while his real hand remains at his side.

You do the things. You hold the roles, answer to your name, meet the people you’re meant to meet. From the outside it looks like a life, and by most measures it is a good one.

And underneath there is a kind of vacancy. A sense of going through it rather than being in it. Days pass and you are present for them without quite being in them, as though the life is happening slightly to one side of you.

A kind of vacancy.

A man pours from a kettle into two identical mugs at a kitchen table, though he is sitting alone.

There is often no story to tell.

A man reaches towards a single unlit candle on a table where the burn ring around it is already scorched black.

There is often no story to tell that would make someone understand. Nothing happened. No loss you could point to, no event that would explain it. Which can make the feeling harder to take seriously — easy to set against everything you have and call self-indulgent.

It tends to persist anyway, underneath the gratitude and the counting of blessings, quietly unmoved by them.

It tends to persist anyway.

A man weighs a swede on kitchen scales whose needle has not moved from where it started.

Where it comes from

Most people who arrive with this have already tried to reason their way out of it. Listed what is good. Named what they should feel. Reminded themselves of everyone who has less. And found the feeling still sitting there underneath, untouched by the argument.

Most people who arrive with this have already tried to reason their way out of it.

An older Black man in a pale apron sets a steaming lidded casserole on a wooden kitchen counter while a complete sharp ring of frost remains beneath its hot base.

That is worth taking seriously rather than overriding.

A man pauses with a paint roller beside an intact hallway wall whose raised, moisture-beaded surface traces the full route of a hidden pipe.

That is worth taking seriously rather than overriding, because the feeling is not a failure of perspective. It is information.

A self is not something most of us are handed and then simply have. For many people it gets assembled early, out of what the surroundings required — what kept things steady, what was welcome, what was too much. You become fluent in being what the moment needs. It is an intelligent thing to learn, and it works — and it can leave you successful and unseen, including to yourself. The cost arrives later, and quietly: somewhere in the fluency, your own register — what you actually want, what you are drawn to, what you feel before you have worked out what you are supposed to feel — gets turned down so low it stops reaching you.

A self gets assembled early, out of what the surroundings required.

A man crouches beside a level breakfast table while its nearest intact wooden leg hangs several centimetres above the floor.

Then nothing is wrong, and something is missing.

A woman carrying folded towels opens an intact hallway door onto a shallow wallpapered wall and skirting where the room should be.

Then nothing is wrong, and something is missing, and the two are hard to hold at once.

What is easy to miss is that something registers the difference. Something in you knows the distance between going through a life and being in one, or there would be no vacancy to feel. The emptiness is being noticed — and noticing is not nothing.