It was one thing that since 1965 I remember my life as a sequence of events. Another thing that happened during the same year was my realization of myself being a person: one of many and unique because this person was me.
Strangely, I was ashamed of these thoughts and never told my mom about them. Also, these thoughts made my head spinning, quite literally. I felt lightheaded when I thought about that for a too long time, and that’s why I was trying to divert my thoughts in some other direction.
That’s how it would go. It happened most of the time when I was outside, taking a walk with Nanny Katia, and saw other children walking with their parents or nannies. I thought: that’s me, and I have all these thoughts in my head, and now I speak to myself, and also I can see everything and everybody around me. That’s my “inside”, and all my thoughts and impressions and “inside.” But at the same time, on my walk, I meet other children.
And for me, they are just “other children.” But for each of them, they carry their own worlds inside, and they look at me and see “me” as one of many other children. For each of them, they are the most important thing in the whole world. I imagined how each of these children had their thoughts and had their “I”‘s, and at that moment, my head would start to spin. I would start to repeat in my head: Who “I” am? What it means – “I”? What is “I’? What makes “I”? How come that I have the whole world inside me, and the whole world exists as long as I can see it and touch it?
I remember that I thought that all these thoughts are wrong, and I should not think them :). And I was trying not to think them, and I never told anybody about them.
Now I am wondering whether all children have such thoughts when they start to form their “I” and distantiate it from the outer world. When they realize when they have their thoughts and that the world exists as long as they can see, feel and touch it.
…. And you know what? Fifty-six years later, it still feels like a miracle: the fact that “I” exist, snd that everything happens with “me.” And I am a participant and an observant at the same time.
Hettie's Reflections 