Internal world

Drawing my sense of self

I recently watched both Inside Out and Inside Out 2 at the enthusiastic recommendation of a few SPARClers in 2024. On the surface level, the films tell a story of how anthropomorphized emotions like Joy, Sadness, Anxiety, (and more!), try to help Riley, a young girl from Minnesota, respond to extraordinary and ordinary life events: moving cities in elementary school and trying out for a high school hockey camp. They work within the whimsical dreamscape in Riley’s mind, which of course changes as she grows up. I thought the film gave excellent explanations for concepts like why we feel sadness and how anxiety can hurt us by trying too hard to protect us from future harms. But I felt most inspired by how the film concretized Riley’s cognitive internals through a creative mixture of visual and narrative interpretation.

spoilers ahead

At the beginning of Inside Out 2, Riley’s sense of self is a light blue tree formed from core memories of her being a good friend, hockey teammate, daughter; unsurprisingly, this sense of self echoes “I am a good person.” But of course no person is that simple. Anxiety shows up, alongside the triple E of emotions: Embarrassment, Ennui, and Envy, and each of them contribute core memories that meld into Riley’s sense of self. By the end of the film, her light blue tree regrows into a ceaselessly shifting tree of different core beliefs and values. 

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Inspired by this, I drew some representations of my internals! 

Desires 

While Riley’s goofy, diminutive Anxiety radiates energy in every scene, I feel my anxiety as more of a slow, steady, quiet build up. The building blocks compose to form an unrelenting to-do list of things I should be doing. I assign myself these tasks to generate pressure and motivation to complete tasks, even though this method inherently ensures that the list will never get done!

Anxiety is orange! And usually, I’m doing it to myself.

I have a somewhat healthier relationship with motivation these days, although the excitement to do 5.5 things at the same time still bubbles over from time to time. Sometimes, this leads to an hours or days-long pursuit. And other times, it means noodling around, switching between tasks, and opening tabs on my computer without any movement toward any of my desires. Apparently, ethologists call this phenomenon “displacement behavior”—when an animal is caught between strong conflicting desires and instead does something unrelated to any of its “real” desires. The classic example is a bird preening even after it has already groomed because it’s unsure if it wants to eat or try to attract a mate.

A 2D projection of things I genuinely want to do. Currently, this includes running a marathon, two different research projects, designing some 3D prints, writing this blog post, and cooking something new every week.

And then, there are the things that I want to want to do. This is a useful conceptual framework I encountered at SPARC ’24:

Wanting something, and wanting to want something. Right now, this mostly consists of reading academic papers…

My high school self fell into this pattern semi-frequently. I felt like I knew a few people who were just the kindest souls who genuinely felt joy at giving others happiness, and they seemed to act on this principle all the time! Seeing this, I wanted to intrinsically want the best for others as these people did. Unfortunately, this just didn’t work. I haven’t rewired the load-bearing values inside of me to automatically want good things for everyone I meet. But, I did practice trying to see what makes others a little bit happier, and I sometimes even practiced acting on the things I saw!

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Emulation

There’s a funny adage that “You’re the average of your 5 closest friends.” I think that’s not quite right.

My inner amalgam of people whom I carespect for.

I emulate discrete bits and bobs of people whom I respect or care about. But importantly, I have an inner judge deciding who I carespect and which pieces of them stick with me. To a lesser extent, every person I meet, whether I like them or not, probably elicits a reaction that nudges me toward or away from being like them. I used to wonder if this meant that I was “unoriginal” because I was only emulating or mixing what I observed in others, as opposed to being generative. But at some point, belief in an “idea” seeps into the subconscious, and it becomes part of the way I live. 

Superposition

I sometimes think of my self as a superposition of different Georges with a fluctuating composition over time. This is true of my path in research, hobbies, and social roles. Still, I feel it is important to understand people as more than a linear combination of traits or identities or values. That’s why I had to draw all these different views of myself!

Other children called me Curious George as a kid. I hated it, but ironically, it came true. Exploration is a major source of joy in my life. This tendency made my sense of self pretty hard to write down or tell to others cohesively (Sorry! Thanks for making this far), but it makes the drawings a little more fun.

The most important feature of this “superposition” drawing is that the horizon of possible versions of me expands with time. I have two reflections on this: First, I have immense privilege and reason to be grateful that my life context let me try being all these different versions of me. Second, I think there is a positive feedback loop of 1. experiencing growth leads me to believe new (skills, values, contexts) are attainable 2. believing in new possible realities leads me to grow into them. Nastia recently said to me: “If you know you can learn how to do something, you basically already know how to do it.” But I’ll push it a step farther: If you convince yourself you can figure something out, you’ll be able to see what’s beyond it.

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The pictures and the words tell complementary versions of a story. Sometimes they contradict, and sometimes they fill each other in. I think that’s true of my senses of self too.