Mistaking My Hats for My Mind - Part 2

Optional title: "The Skewered Self's Friendly Jesters"

My friend who lost her mind and then found it again wrote me a note saying she liked my post about minds and hats. This was my response to her:

Just as, when you were recently expressing a knowing that your recent dark period would pass -- even while you were in the midst of it -- and I appreciated the power of that knowing, so I find, in allowing that there are many minds that take me up at different times, a certain relief — a freedom from the impulse schooled in me to point to and evaluate a presumed singular self. Instead, I start to entertain a new image, of selves and perspectives as stepping stones I can skip among, maybe ever more deftly and with wider and wider freedom of movement and dance.

How often I paralyze myself when asked a question: what are you feeling, why did you say that? Gasp. I presume a singular self that must or should have a singular response: I presume a why that will pin me to a place like a bug or butterfly in a box. When and if I shake the paralysis, I begin to see all the many layers of self and feeling always that are there, and that seem to appear in the instant I look for them, and I feel relief to discover my own plurality, that every self skewered by a pointing finger is accompanied by a merry bunch of open-armed jesters.