STORYTIME: THE SPLIT
A.K.A. ME, MYSELF & I - FLD STTNG TRLGY: PART III
A lot of these writings and stories are deeply personal. And I think it’s important to say why I share them publicly.
I don’t expect everyone’s life to be like mine. But these stories are not only about me.
I share them because I believe many of my personal experiences are human in scope.
The details may change. The names may change. The environments may change.
But underneath a lot of our experiences are similar questions:
Identity. Conditioning. Pain. Memory. Relationships. Performance. Meaning. Wholeness. Becoming.
So while these stories are personal to me… I hope people also use them as mirrors to reflect on their own.
Because sometimes hearing someone else articulate a personal realization helps us recognize something we already felt but never fully had language for ourselves.
That being said…
Around 2009/2010, I bought tickets to see one my favorite groups, CocoRosie in concert in Manhattan somewhere.
I asked my friend and co-worker Carlo to come with me because I knew he wasn’t a fan but would appreciate the experience. I had never seen them perform before. And I had been waiting a long time for them to come to NYC.
Carlo smoked a lot of weed.
I did not.
I went to his house so we can go together to the concert. Before we headed out he said:
“I wanna hit this weed before we leave.”
He pulled out this large water-filled pitcher and an empty two-liter soda bottle with the bottom cut off. He packed a tiny piece of weed into a foil bowl with a couple of holes poked in it at the top. He lowered the bottle into the water, lit it, and slowly pulled the bottle upward until it filled completely with smoke.
Then he inhaled the entire thing.
I remember looking at him thinking:
“DAAAYUMMM… that’s a LOT of smoke.”
So I asked him:
“How many times do you do that before you go out?”
He shrugged and he said:
“I don’t know, like five or six.”
And for some reason my brain translated that into:
“Well… I can do ONE then...”
I thought it would be cool to be a little elevated while seeing CocoRosie live. I imagined it making the music feel bigger. More immersive. Figured it would surely be a good time.
So he prepared one for me.
I watched him repeat the process, filling the bottle with smoke before signaling to me it was ready. He made no show of it whatsoever, so I didn’t either.
I inhaled.
Immediately I felt and heard everything simultaneously.
A snap.
Or a pop.
Or a crack.
Or all of the above.
Not even metaphorically. Literally.
And I was instantly outta here.
Not the normal creeping-up kind of high that I was expecting. This was not gradual. This was immediate.
As we walked toward the door, something happened that fundamentally changed my life.
I started hearing voices and a small smatter of chatter in my mind.
Not hallucinations exactly. More like distinct internal presences in a small room talking amongst themselves with different tones and personalities.
One voice rose above the others. It was calm. Extremely calm.
And it said:
“You do not need to be out like this.”
We walked downstairs to wait for the black car we called, because this was before Uber, and the calm voice said:
“Do not let the goon near the sidewalk. Stand with your back against the wall.”
At the time, I completely understood what the voice meant by “the goon” although this was not language that I used at all in my current vocabulary.
What the voice meant was:
Do not let the unthinking BODY make decisions right now.
Do not trust impulse.
Do not follow reflex.
Do not surrender control.
And I understood it immediately.
I told Carlo:
“Hey man… I am SUPER high right now. I don’t need to be out tonight. I can’t be walking around Manhattan like this. I’m gonna go home.”
I repeated:
“I SHOULD NOT BE OUT TONIGHT.”
He looked at me at first confused but he was high as well and all I heard was his Dave Chappelle voice shrugging and saying “Well, sometimes you gotta go home.”
His car arrived. He got in. He left.
Then the calm voice said:
“Now call your own car. Pull your address up on your phone in case the BODY can’t respond to questions. You can just show the driver.”
The car arrived. I get in the back seat.
And I heard the calm voice say: “Good. Just let me handle this.”
Up until that point, the BODY had mostly been quiet.
But then it started reacting to the talk radio segment playing on the car radio. I was laughing pretty emphatically (I was still high. So the radio, which I never listen to, was pretty funny to me). I was responding naturally. Acting on instinct.
And suddenly I realized there were multiple “presences” existing at once.
There was:
The BODY A.K.A. The Goon
This calm voice
And then there was “I.” The passenger. The observer sitting between impulse and guidance.
And then came the realization that changed everything:
“Me, myself, and I” as in “solo dolo”…as in “all I got is me”… as in “me against the world”… was wrong.
It was actually: “Me”, “My Self” (TWO WORDS), and “I.”
Three distinct functions.
And that snap - that pop - that crack I heard earlier…I believed that was the moment my consciousness split open enough for me to perceive them separately.
“Me” was my presentation to the world. The personality - The “character” on the page. The costume design. The construct built from all that I think I am.
“I” was the architecture beneath that presentation - The backstory. The values. The decisionmaker. The taste. The underlying framework that built the identity of “Me”
But “My Self”...
“My Self” felt ancient.
“My Self” understood things instantly.
“My Self” did not argue.
It guided.
It knew.
That was the moment I realized - That maybe the expression “Know thyself” is wrong too. Firstly, it’s two words as in “thy Self”. Not one as in “thyself”
But also wrong because you cannot fully know “thy Self.” “Self” is too vast. Too ancient. Too deep. “Self” knows and understands more than our human “minds” can grapple or conceive.
You do not master “Self”.
You encounter “Self”.
And once encountered…
You learn to listen.
It was over the next few days that I started writing all of this down. This is a story and realization I remember pretty lucidly… and the core realization has never left me.
That experience fundamentally changed me.
Because after that night, I could identify the source of my thoughts more clearly.
I could hear when “Me” was speaking. I could hear when “I” was speaking. And I could hear when “My Self” was speaking.
Which also meant I could begin identifying voices that did not originate from any of them.
That night permanently changed the way I understood my consciousness forever. But it was just the opening salvo.
It eventually became the foundation for multiple LAW OF 39 lessons, especially as yet unpublished Lesson 45: I Hear Voices AKA Chatterboxes. Years before that, it was materialized as one of my “Visual Thoughts” series (Works on paper).
“Listen Closely” - Original = Acrylic on Paper
And even years before that, it was one of my designs from my after work screen printing class at SVA.
This is a realization that keeps realizing…
Capital Self is encountered.
Lowercase self is created.
If there is anything I hope people take from this story, it’s this:
Understanding almost always arrives long after the experience itself.
Often we live something years before we fully recognize what it meant.
And sometimes the patterns we keep returning to through our art, relationships, journals, conversations, memories, and questions…are not random.
They are signals.
That has been one of the biggest realizations of this entire process for me. Not that I “figured life out.” But that many of us are quietly circling the same deeper questions without acknowledging it.
Questions about who we are beneath conditioning.
Beneath performance. Beneath inherited pain. Beneath the identities we learned to survive through.
Questions about truth.
Wholeness. Meaning. Consciousness.
I’m still exploring those questions myself.
But recognizing the questions is the beginning.
As always… in divine time.
