Inner Worlds
I have been thinking almost continuously about inner worlds, about who has access to ours and how they show up in the world.
I have always thought of myself as someone with a very rich inner life. It is very present to me, as present as the real world. Clearly it is my real world. I don’t know if anything can be made to count as much as our inner lives do. I have expressed mine in varying ways across the almost three decades I have been alive. I have written a lot of poetry, tried to write some songs, made some music, penned countless blog posts like this one on a wide variety of websites and apps and whatever else. I have talked so, so much about my feelings. I have paid one person to listen to me talk about them, and my mother has paid three others. All these things I think and feel are what I hold onto most sincerely, the core of me. When my mother asked me about a month ago what I most value, I said the ability to identify and express emotions. I don’t know that we do much else in life, aside from engage in forced labor under capitalism.
It is sort of magical to have access to something as interesting as ourselves. In all my life I will never sort through it all. I look forward to the changing experience of being me. And I think it is important to me that my inner world belongs only to me. I make choices about who gets to be part of it—and which part they get to be part of. I am aware of the pieces that stay behind in side me, or that get dispersed in conversations with the people I have allowed to see those specific pieces. Having that control, and feeling able to share the parts I want to share when I want to share them, is it. It is all of me.
It is so normal and natural to wish we could gain entry to other people’s internal worlds; we obsess over the idea of mind-reading. Yet when supernatural mind-readers are portrayed in narrative, we seem to forget that other people’s thoughts are as messy and complex as ours. I am reminded of the restaurant scene in Twlight, where Stephanie Meyer in her desire to differentiate Edward and Bella from the rest of human(oid) kind has Edward relay the various thoughts of other diners. In my memory, they’re all things like money, sex, and cat (?). Our thoughts are the extensions, part and parcel, of our inner worlds. And the other diners’ inner worlds are plain. They are not the windy and disastrous and evil and funny and nice things that make up our real inner worlds. And Bella, of course, is impenetrable to Edward (and “impenetrable” has a lot of meanings here). Her mind is unreadable, which I think is to say that it is not like the other minds in the room. She is somehow more complex; her inner world is sprawling. It certainly can’t be distilled down to “cat.” In Stephanie Meyer’s writing, Edward sees Bella as the exception. Hers is the only inner world that he recognizes as the mess that it probably is, the same kind of mess he knows his own to be.
Why do we place these limits on other peoples’ subjectivity? The inner worlds of us, however we happen to be defining that at the moment, are much more complex than theirs. And either way, we want access. We want to believe that there is something to be gleaned for us from another person’s internal self.
My core belief is that there is no translation for the inner worlds of other people other than the ones they offer. We cannot project our thinking onto those worlds. We cannot mind-read—not just because we are not in the Twilight or whatever universe, but because human thoughts cannot be distilled in that way. They are utterly subjective and when someone lets you into theirs, you must take it at face value. Don’t try to put it into Google Translate. They don’t have a setting for that, and you don’t know what language it is anyway.
As I am thinking about who has wanted access to my inner world, as I think about how I am feeling all of my fragmented selves coming together this fall after a year of scattering, I am thinking that there is power in that lack of translation. It is beautiful to have something that only belongs to me.
