On sometimes being a grizzly bear

Having read Scott’s latest review of The Others Within Us and reflected a bit on Jaynes and the Bicameral Mind lately, I thought I’d tell my own story about, for want of a less pretentious term other ways of being.

I-Introducing Bear

Everyone who knows me knows that I often grunt instead of speaking. For example, I will often say ra-ra instead of goodbye. Sometimes I will speak with a deep voice, and out will come the persona of BEAR. Bear is a Grizzly Bear and a loyal servant of BEAR COUNCIL. He is called Bear for the same reason that many Christians are called Christian, and many Muslims are called Mohammed- Bear is a popular name in Bear culture because it captures the essence of Bearishness. The Bears are a proud people, Bear himself is exceptionally proud of his kind, and he serves as a DIPLLOMMAT for them. Bear speaks in capital letters, and when he texts my friends, it’s always in all caps, which makes telling us apart easy. His spelling is not great, because English is his fifth or six language- he speaks everything from Bear (of course), to fluent Walrus, and a smattering of Tiger and Orca. He is, after all, a DIPPLOOMART, and a figure of profound respect among the Bearish people (though, he would be the first to add EVERRY BEAR IS DA FIGAR OF PROFOUNMD RESPERCT AMONK DA BEAR PEEPLE).

The background to this is almost certainly that a lot of autistic people adopt the personas of animals and other beings. I’m not sure why. Partly I think it might just be that the forces stopping us are weaker than in others. Having multiple personas can be quite useful emotionally and we feel less pressure than neurotypicals to stop doing it. It’s really hard to have a self, there is a profound sense in which you can just… stop. You can conceive of yourself as a commonwealth, it’s easier trying to squish it all into a unity. Another reason for autistic personas might be the different architectures of both the mind and self. I suspect autistic people don’t quite fit the same Modern-Conception-of-the-self that other people manage to fit into relatively naturally- if with some difficulty.

So yeah- less felt pressure to unify the self, and a self that is, in any case, harder to unify lead some autistics away from a unitary self. I am large. I contain multitudes.

Is it even so unusual, at the most basic level, not to be a unity, but a drifting constellation of mental icebergs of different sizes? For example- and much of what I say next will apply to many Neurotypical people too:

There is a part of me that is terrified of shame and the hatred of others. There is a part of me that only cares about The Mission to get humanity through the next few centuries well. There is a part of me who thinks I’m a genius on a heroes journey. There is a part of me who thinks I’m a dork with a profoundly damaged brain who can’t think properly. There is a part of me that watches me with a sardonic, but ultimately kindly amusement, like watching a loveable child who is convinced he will get a cardboard box to go to the moon. There is a part of me that desires social power and fame. There is a part of me that dreams of heroically dying to protect good people. There is a part of me that wants to change the world but to do so anonymously. There is a part of me that thinks I’m a saint. There’s a part of me that thinks I’m the most venal person alive and possibly even dangerous. There’s a part of me that thinks I’m a loveable mess. There’s a part of me that thinks my own inability to grasp myself is incredibly dangerous. There’s a part of me that thinks none of this matters- these voices and their debates over what person they constitute mean nothing- they’re background noise over the real question- what do I do to relate to the world?

And there’s a part of me that is a BEAR DIPPLOMAT.

Why should I try to hammer this all into a single persona? It forms a whole in a way more like a nation forms a whole, than the way the borg forms a whole. That’s good enough for me.

II- Self

Having all these aspects as a person might seem like it must come from self-absorption. I hope that the opposite may be true. Precisely because I don’t want to spend an enormous amount of time hammering myself into something consistent, creating a “narrative of me” and all that, this is why I sprawl so much. Like a book written in haste that is long because painful hours haven’t been spent editing it down. I try to let the different would-be self-concepts drift. I never want to be one of those people who has made a tight, coherent, self-story to sell to themselves and others and hammered myself into a particular shape. I am not a product.

A lot of the clashing self-concepts I mentioned are neurotic af, and this much, assuredly, is a problem. Some of them are quite useful even if neurotic. I find that simultaneously being deeply convinced I am a genius and an idiot drives writing easily. The “genius” writes while the sneerer edits. Some, admittedly, are less useful. I’d drop them if I could. Still, even the most profoundly damaging aspects of myself, like severe treatment-resistant OCD have made me into who I am, and have at least helped my writing. I imagine that if I tried to squish myself into a ball, I would risk becoming one of those people with OCD who think their terrible thoughts mean they’re a terrible person.

To the extent that I try to cultivate any over-self at all, it’s like this. Once I took LSD and MDMA together. One of the things I was excited to do was meet BEAR. I didn’t meet Bear, what I instead felt was a deep love for myself and everyone else. I at once felt that all life and the projects that fuelled it were profoundly important - but also I felt a wry amusement at the absurdities of the various self-conceptions. All the stories we tell ourselves seem like children running around claiming to be criminals or princesses or superheroes. Bear, whom I felt a deep love for, was absent- perhaps in part because there was nothing to PROTECC. A lot of me was absent, it almost felt like being something that wasn’t me, seeing me from the outside, with both love and laughter.

That combination of deep concern for ethical projects, but a compassionate, ironic, wry and indulgent distance from the stories we throw together in my own head is something I aim for sometimes. Smirking at my own silliness, but with genuine love rather than contempt, like a parent watching children play. I’m sure that self is in me somewhere, looking at my attempt to emulate it with indulgent love, watching the commonwealth of me bicker.

III-More on Bear

Back to Bear. Bear is convinced that one of his main missions, and the mission of all bears is to PROTTECT. He believes he became associated with me in order to PROTECC. Bear really, truly, hates SNAEK. It would be fair to say that the Bearish people are in a kind of eternal cold war with snakes. Bear sees them as spiritually opposed to Bears in a profound sense.

Bear, while a lover of the Bearish people is not parochial. Bears have a strange but beautiful way of drawing close to other animals in whom they see Bear nature (really, most of them). They declare them “THE BEAR OF THE X”. E.g., Walrus is THE BEAR OF THE OCEAN. Wombat is THE BEAR OF THE MARSUPIALS. Sharks are THE BEAR OF THE WAVE. Dragons are THE BEAR OF THE AIR.

Bears function via direct democracy. They hold BEAR COUNCIL in a kind of dream world they all go to when they sleep. Although bears may be asocial and sometimes antagonistic in this world, in the dream space of Bear council they are a profoundly communal animal with a deep love for each other as individuals and a species. Politically, within broader animal geopolitics, they are a powerful force, largely because they are incredibly committed diplomats. They really want to connect with other animals. Their closest allies- largely due to the work of Bear himself, are the Walruses. So close is Bear’s connection with the Walrus people that he was the first non-Walrus ever to be permitted to meet THE GRAND WALRUS. (The Walruses are a Monarchy, although the truth is a little more complex than this).

Bear, gentle and fierce, massive and full of love for all things big and small, wise but never jaded, committed to being as strong as he can so he can help those who cannot be stronger, just but full of love, is a model for us all. I often try to share Bear. I feel that something like Bear would help many people. This is partly why I made a Facebook group: A group where we're all a council of wise bears

I attach some images that, while not literal renderings, seem to me to capture some of the essence of Bear.