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Child Development
Why We Sometimes Feel Like a Child and an Adult Simultaneously
A cumulative theory of self, as described in a children's book.
Posted February 4, 2020 Reviewed by Daniel Lyons M.A.
Is your concept of self — the person you perceive yourself to be — singular or plural?
This might sound like a diagnostic question related to dissociative identity disorder, but it's actually a question that applies much more broadly, even to people with no mental health challenges.
I recently discovered an interesting response to this question in an unexpected place: a children's book.
I've been reading the books in Trenton Lee Stewart's Mysterious Benedict Society series to my children, and I have greatly enjoyed how enthralled they are by the daring adventures and perplexing puzzles the book presents, all centered around four remarkable children who are recruited to help save the world.
Every once in awhile, we encounter a passage in the books that my children are able to comprehend but perhaps not appreciate quite as fully as we grown-up readers can.
In one such passage, an older character with an adventurous past talks about a strange feeling that occurs when he gets together with the children's mentor, Nicholas Benedict, who was his childhood friend. The character, John, says that he feels not only like himself as he is now, but also like himself as he was when he and Nicholas were young boys.
Then, John describes an explanation that Nicholas offered for this phenomenon:
"He doesn't believe we become different people as we age. No, he says he believes that we become more people. We're still the kids we were, but we're also the people who've lived all the different ages since that time. A whole bunch of different people all rolled up into one — that's how Nicholas sees it. And I can't say that I disagree. How else to explain that sometimes I want to run and jump the way I used to — but can't anymore — yet at the same time enjoy sitting with a cup of coffee and a newspaper in a way you couldn't have paid me to do as a boy? Well, it's a wonder."
A Theory of Self (or Selves)
This theory of how we perceive ourselves suggests that we experience life not just as the age we are now, but more like the accumulation of all the ages we have been, co-existing together.
And that certainly rings true with me.
When I get together with old college friends, I wouldn't say that it feels as if I'm 21 again. But it does feel as if that 21-year-old self exists in union with all of the selves I've been since then. I can easily return to old inside jokes and the feeling of having so many potential routes my future might take, while simultaneously appreciating the route it actually did take, and that I was shaped along the way.
Similarly, in my marriage, when I look into my wife's eyes, it often feels like I'm gazing not just at her as she is now, but at every version of her I remember since the start of our relationship. Yes, we've accumulated some gray hair and other signs of age, but there is a sort of iridescence to what I see, where in a certain mental light I'm seeing both the woman I love now and her younger self as she walked down the aisle at our wedding.
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that all things pass and nothing abides — "No man ever steps in the same river twice." There's a similar view in Eastern religions; Buddhism, for instance, teaches that everything temporal is impermanent and continuously changing.
This cumulative theory of self might be described as a partially opposing view. Yes, everything changes, but also (at least in terms of our perception of our self) everything abides.
A Break From the Past
If we are comfortable enough with our old self, it might be easy to embrace the idea that it never truly leaves us, but remains part of an accumulation of persons, past and present.
But what if we have undergone some sort of radical transformation, and we look back at our younger self with disappointment, embarrassment, detachment, or even horror?
Here it might be useful to think of our past selves as being subservient to our present self, which can either summon or bury them.
My present-day self knows that there's a time for fun and a time for work, and I have acquired the maturity to know when to buckle down in a way that I might not have had during my childhood.
And yet, when it's time to cut loose, I can allow that younger part of my self to become unbridled. I can bounce off the walls at a trampoline park with my children, and the kid in me can enjoy all the fun, even while the adult in me knows that I'm going to wake up with an achy back tomorrow.
Similarly, it's possible to symbolically bury the versions of our past self that we no longer connect with or recognize as authentic. Or perhaps we can remember with compassion the self that needed to exist to survive. That doesn't mean we have to use strategies that often prove unhelpful in the long term, such as bottling up emotions or repression, but we can acknowledge that we are no longer defined by that past self and that to the extent it remains with us, it's only in memory and not in influence.
