Me, Myself and I

If you’re a regular reader then you’ll know I discuss various aspects of melody as an increasingly strong persona.  If you’re not a regular reader, this post may not make much sense.  It’s a mood piece and rambles a bit.  A post for me as the audience.

As an independent identifiable entity melody’s pro-active life approximates to how long this blog has been active.  That happens to be a complete coincidence but it does mean that there’s been more than a few words written about how melody sees herself in relation to the world and how that has changed over time.

One of the ways that this changes is how the entity that includes ‘him’ and ‘her’ views the flux in their comparative ascendancy.

Three years ago I had my first surprise that melody was more than a name involved in play and dress up periodically let out of the locked trunk.  She had no power, she was a curiosity that explained a lot of things over preceding decades.

There was no ‘we’, there was only ‘I’ and it referred exclusively to ‘him’.  She was there in a corner, yet had only minor impact on thought processes unless he made room for her – which he rarely did.

Moving on to about two years ago she’d used her elbows to garner more recognition.  I don’t think that there was too much doubt in my own mind as to what I meant referring to ‘I’ or ‘We’, but it could be confusing for others because the definitions could change moment by moment.

There was a definite, though tentative ‘We’.  An acknowledgement that ‘she’ really did exist and that the ‘We’ referred to a composite persona where on a sliding scale he was largely in the ascendancy, but that once in a while the slider moved across the halfway in her direction.

This is where the meaning of ‘I’ became fluid.  The ownership of ‘I’ was still largely ‘him’ yet it could increasingly switch to being ‘her’.

Eighteen months ago was a big awakening of melody.  It made it possible for her to grab that slider all the way in her direction.  Not a permanent takeover but whilst in that state the ‘I’ was specifically her and a composite ‘We’ didn’t exist again until she was ready to let him back in.

When he was let back in it made the ‘I’ interestingly fluid.  That slider could cross the line in one direction or another without conscious effort – perhaps in response to external stimuli and who was best to deal with it at the time.  I started to learn to use ‘We’ as the simplest way of referring the amalgam of personas.  Also learning as to which was ascendant and owning ‘I’ at each moment.  As I say, confusing for others looking in but not me looking out.

The changes across this last eighteen months are more significant than I thought as I went through them.  The accommodation whereby ‘We’ described a fairly even fluidity of the composite has changed quite drastically.  It’s like a reverse mirror of a couple of years ago, only now melody is almost universally the primary persona in charge of ‘I’.

Now when I use ‘I’, it’s rare that it has any meaning in regard to ‘him’.  He’s not that interested in grabbing that slider and taking charge.  If it’s at all necessary, she has to force it on him.

The basics of this post have been in the drafts folder for six months and I see that more change has occurred in that time.  Whilst I’ve been quite specific in this post on ‘him’, ‘her’ etc, I realise that in most of my writing these days I rarely make that kind of distinction.  I assume internally that ‘I’ is always melody unless specified otherwise.

I also kind of guess that my audience long since bothered about me differentiating who I considered I was at the time and pretty much assume I’ve always been melody in this blog.

To a degree, that’s correct.  But that ‘I’ which is melody now goes way beyond that.  It’s who she is in public, too.