no thyself

I am the only self I know. But knowing yourself is a strange thing. It's not like knowing someone else. Just like you can't see your own face, you aren't aware of your own self. Other people see qualities in me - good and bad - but I don't. We rely on a mirror to see our physical appearance and we rely on responses from others to get a sense of ourselves.

It's funny how we don't really know ourselves. In a way, you know yourself better than anyone else, but, at the same time, you don't know yourself. When you are having a conversation and you say something funny or interesting, it's as funny or interesting to you as it is to the person you are talking to. It's new and surprising to you even though you said it, because it comes partly from this self that you don't fully know. You don't know what this self is going to say.

When I write, a lot of it is responding to what I just wrote. I'll read what I just wrote and see where I can go from there. I respond to it as if.....not as if someone else wrote it, but not exactly as if I wrote it either. The key point is that I respond to it. It's composition and response. I'm a composer and responder.