An experiment that came out of my recovery
I am in Alcoholics Anonymous. I have eight and a half years sober, and I go almost every day. One of the passages that sticks out to me in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous is this phrase: selfishness, self-centeredness, that we think is the root of our troubles. The opposite of selfishness and self-centeredness is God-consciousness, an awareness that there is more than this body and this mind and this ego to who I am. Who I am is not this body and this mind. This body and this mind are kind of something I am doing right now. They are not who I am.
So yesterday, or maybe it was the day before, I did a little experiment. I thought, what if I talked in third person instead of first person? What if, instead of speaking as I, as in I as Jerry Banfield, I just spoke in third person? Instead of saying I and my and me, I would say Jerry. For example, instead of saying I want to do this or I think this, I was saying Jerry wants to do this, or Jerry is thinking about this.
How confusing and difficult it was
God, that was confusing and difficult. Just doing it for one day was unbelievable. Unbelievably confusing and difficult to deal with. It was amazing how confusing and difficult it was. I felt really awkward speaking about Jerry in the third person.
My mother played along really nicely and thought it was fun. My sponsee in AA thought it was fun, too. I did not even try doing it with my wife, because I know exactly what she was going to say about it: "Oh, you are doing this today, huh? Okay. It is fine. You do your thing. Whatever. This is what we are doing today, huh? All right, that is fine." So I decided I was not even going to tell my wife about it right then, because I knew she was going to give me a lot of junk for it. We were just going to keep things moving right along.
What people's reactions taught me
I spoke in third person all day yesterday, and it became consistently more and more obnoxious. It was interesting to observe how people reacted to it. It was also interesting to observe how afraid I was of people judging me, and of people thinking negative things about me over it. I was surprised how much that mattered to me. I go around thinking I am a person who does not really care what people think or what people say. But it turns out I do. It turns out I do care what people think, more than you would figure.
I noticed how difficult it was to talk in third person, and I could see why most people do not talk that way. It was still a great experiment, though. It was very nice to try talking in third person for a day, and it reminded me that it is more important that I communicate with people effectively. What is really important is to have good communication with others. Good communication with others is very valuable, and we do not want to make it difficult to communicate because of the language I am using. I do not want to do anything that makes it harder to communicate with people. Doing some third-person talking thing, I found, is obnoxious, and I am glad I stopped it. But it was a valuable lesson in just trying something new, and I love that I try new things and experiment.
The denial of the self
Someone watching said it felt like a denial of ourselves, like it was a joke or something. That was something I did face yesterday, and I thought about it. Speaking in that disembodied way did make things a little more difficult to deal with. I am very much about being fully embodied in myself and fully present in everything, so speaking in a disembodied state was weird, and I do not want to do that anymore. We do not want to be disembodied and disconnected from ourselves. In my experience that is not a good thing to do. Speaking in third person, I could really see why most people do not do it, but it is also true that most people have never tried talking in third person before.
What I really liked was that yesterday my brain got challenged hardcore. Speaking in a disembodied state was weird, and speaking in third person was so difficult that it made it hard for me to talk at all. I find it really valuable to challenge your brain, to make your brain struggle, to learn new things and try new things. That is a really valuable activity to engage in, so I am glad I tried it yesterday. If you want to follow more of these little experiments and reflections from my recovery and my daily life, you can find them in my Life playlist, where I share what I am learning as I go.