The concept of different “I’s,” as defined by Smith and Watson in Reading Autobiography Now: An Updated Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, offers a unique lens to understand the complexity of self-representation in autobiographical writing. For the author, these I’s reveal the multifaceted nature of identity, and how it is shaped, remembered, and performed.
For instance, the narrating “I.” It represents the author’s present self, interpreting their past from a reflective distance alongside the reader. Shaped by hindsight, it offers a constructed narrative of experiences that may differ from how they were originally lived. The experiencing “I,” however, embodies the author’s past self, engaging directly in the emotions, actions, and events as they unfolded. The two contrast the interpretive nature of memory with storytelling. Then there’s the historical “I,” which situates the author in a specific cultural and social context, acknowledging time and space, and the ideological “I,” which reflects on how societal norms and power structures shape the author’s self-perception and behavior. Together, these “I’s” reveal the ways external forces influence the author’s internal narrative. Then finally, there’s the embodied “I,” which emphasizes the role of the physical self in constructing identity. It incorporates elements of pleasure, pain, and vulnerability, and shapes the way the author experiences and remembers life.
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If anything, these different “I’s” prove that identity is not fixed, but rather an interplay of memory, context, and perception, and constantly negotiates between authenticity and performance. This provoked me to re-evaluate the ways in which I choose to represent myself across contexts, and try to read between them to identify my most authentic self (subjective as it may be).
Though not a traditional autobiography, I find that my autobiographical selves take many different shapes. Take, for instance, the “I” of my grant proposal narratives or resumes. Here, I carefully curate my experiences into a coherent story of ambition, success, and competence. The uber-professional narrating “I” distills my fragmented past into a version of myself that fits the expectations of potential funders or employers—polished and forward-thinking, with no room for the hesitations or failures of the experiencing “I.”
Similarly, during calls home to my mother, I embody a different “I”: part historian, recounting events from my day in a way that highlights stability and reassurance, and part ideological self, attuned to her cultural expectations of success and well-being. These watered-down conversations are as much about projecting a version of myself for her comfort as they are about connecting with her. Lord knows she would kick my ass if she had the full, no-detail-spared version of my life as I live it.
With friends, the projected versions of my “I” shift depending on the dynamic. To one friend, I might emphasize my playfulness or humor; to another, a more thoughtful side for dealing with life’s complexities. These variations feel real but incomplete, reflecting how I adjust to fit shared interests or emotional needs. My online personalities reflect perhaps the most fractured “I’s” of all. On one platform, I am reserved, carefully curated so as not to rock the boat; on another, I am lighthearted and casual, playing into the social currency of humor and relatability, as well as scaling up my individuality complex with music that’s much cooler than yours. These digital selves both reveal and obscure me, curated for visibility and perception but distanced from the physical and embodied “I.”
So all this beckons a much larger, introspective question: what is my authentic self? Who am I if not performing for others? Is it the collection of physical media across my walls, carefully curated to reflect the person I want to remember—or perhaps the person I want others to see? The hats of all the people I’ve been? The first parking ticket I’ve received, treasured photos, or the subway sign of my hometown? Is it the 16-year-old version of myself that lives on through my burned CD collection, a snapshot of teenage identity immortalized in playlists? Maybe it’s the part of me that spends countless hours lost in work or consuming media for escapism, avoiding deeper reflections? Or is it the version that emerges during long car rides, speaking aloud to myself, working through thoughts I might never share with anyone else? And what of the author writing to you now, crafting these words in a deliberate attempt to represent something real? Is it even possible for me to fully convey that self to you?
The very act of writing, of translating thoughts into text, costs an element of authenticity, as every word is chosen and reshaped by the narrating “I.” These layers of identity, shifting and contextual, make me question whether the idea of an “authentic self” is more of an aspiration than a reality.
Thanks for sharing these reflections, Julianna! Your list of possible selves is remarkable and very relatable–I especially like the idea of the self that is defined by methods employed to escape interrogating the self too deeply! When I said that this was also very relatable, it reminded me of what Smith and Watson note in their chapter on relationality, which is also, in many ways, about authenticity. They write that “Agency, then, might be said to derive from our willingness to narrate our opacity, our fragmentation, our limits of knowability, to narrate, that is, ‘the ways in which we are constituted in relationality: implicated, beholden, derived, sustained by a social world that is beyond us and before us'” (54). For Butler, the density of the selves you describe, simply by sharing them, articulate and opacity, and that recognition, in turn, triggers a certain vulnerability: our shred opacity with and to others.
This is all highly relevant to your reference to the density of the autobiographical “I”s that surround us and that are, in many ways, the source and key to this opacity.