Who am I?

I drank too much whiskey and wine last night. Far too much. I woke up in my mum's dressing gown in my sister' bed (she wasn't in it). What was interesting was that I was woken by my lovely fiancé I not only was unsure as to where I was but also wasn't sure who I was. I even went to the mirror just to check.

It was a pretty horrible experience. For about five minutes I was a thinking thing, peering at a world that seemed alien and unfamiliar. I felt scared, unsettled and unsure. Why?

I think people carry round an illusion of 'me-ness' that provides a coherence to everyday life. It enables experience to be woven into a consistent story and allows a way of thinking where all you experience can be related to an objective "I". Without this, as Sartre showed, we experience an angst, an undermining, by which our trust in the world is shaken and all meaning is destabilised. For what it's worth, Giddens, Beck and others link this to with the modern condition: globalisation, change and instability.

For me, it's the amber alcohol. Anyway, it reminded me of a thought I had when I had depression a few years ago. That was, the experience of being depressed seemed entirely natural. I couldn't understand, given the world and our lives, why everyone wasn't consumed by a morbid, destabilising anxiety. Then I thought that if everyone did feel like this, most of them would (and do!) kill themselves. So maybe, we evolved "happiness" as a survival instinct. Maybe this concept of self, our love and happiness, is simply nature's way of keeping us alive long enough to reproduce. Maybe the depressed and anxious are just seeing the world with the rose-tinted spectacles removed........

Anyway, mine's a large one. Cheers x