You & I Are Not the Same

When discernment gets tangled up with the voice of someone who once made you doubt yourself.

I was half asleep when I began asking the question.

Or maybe I was in that strange place where the mind is still attached to the ordinary world, but the edges have become less rigid. I knew enough that sometimes a thought can arrive in a way that makes you stop and pay attention.

The question was simple.

How do you know the difference?

But when I repeated it out loud, I realized that I said something else.

How do “I” know the difference?

The difference was only one word.

You.

I.

Yet the difference between those two words felt enormous.

How do I know the difference?

That was a question I was asking myself. It was an ordinary question of discernment. I am the one who needs to figure this out. I am the one who needs to know.

But how do you know the difference?

That was different.

That sounded like an exchange! (but between who?)

There was suddenly a questioner and someone being questioned. There was an implied other. Something or someone seemed to know the difference, and I was asking how it knew.

I began wondering about the voice that had formed the question.

Who was the YOU?

I thought about Jung and the way he wrote about the psyche as something larger than the conscious ego. The ego is the part of us that says I. I think. I know. I remember. I am XYZ.

But Jung believed that the psyche contains more than the conscious mind.

There are unconscious parts of us, complexes, archetypal figures, memories, emotional patterns, inner personalities formed through our relationships and experiences. Sometimes these parts can feel almost like someone else.

I wondered if the question had come from some deeper part of myself.

Was the ego asking the Self?

Was I, the conscious part of me, asking something larger than myself:

How do you know?

It was an interesting idea.

But then I heard the sentence again.

How do YOU know the difference?

And suddenly, the tone I noticed changed everything.

It sounded like a child.

Not a sweet child. Not a curious child.

A bratty child!

One I recall from my own childhood…

The emphasis was on “You” (—> Directed at “Me”)

How do YOU know?

There was something challenging about it. Almost mocking. Almost like someone was putting me on the spot….

And then my husband said something that made the whole touch an inner part of me. He said it sounded like my sister… My younger sister.

The sister I have not had a relationship with for years. The sister with whom I have so many unresolved feelings. The sister whose judgment, somehow, has always seemed to occupy a disproportionate amount of space within me.

She is eight years younger than me.

And yet when I think of judgmental eyes watching me, somehow I think of her.

I had never really understood that before.

I had thought of judgment as something larger. The world. People. Other people’s opinions. The eyes of everyone watching.

Now the judgment had a clear face… it had a familiar voice. It was hers.