The Girl With Hair of Fire

secret selves, forgotten dreams, and my new alter ego

My senior year of high school, I took Intro to Psychology.

My recollection of the class is hazy — I can just about summon the giant textbook with a multi-colored brain on the cover, the hum of the overhead lights. Yet one memory remains clear. Near the end of the semester, everyone took a lengthy test (akin to a Myers-Briggs Personality Test) that was meant to reveal your ideal vocation. It was something of a legend in our school: the fabled exam capable of predicting one’s future.

I was seventeen years old and had not yet met myself, my identity a composite of what others (family, peer pressure, societal programming, the dELiA*s Catalogue) had prescribed. I carried a briefcase to kindergarten, was on the debate team, had been sold on the safety of a career in law. When I closed my eyes and pictured adulthood, it was a montage of corner offices, crossing the thresholds of large, columned buildings, and drinking coffee while surrounded by piles of paperwork — visions largely informed by courtroom dramas and film adaptations of John Grisham novels.

When the fateful day came, I took great care to answer every question with thought and honesty, certain it would reveal a path to my vision: Litigator. Politician. Attorney General.

The following day, the teacher placed the results face down on our desks and instructed us to turn them over on the count of three. The room exploded with chatter.

“I got surgeon!”
“I got architect!”
“I got art curator!”
“I got entrepreneur!”

And I got…puppeteer.

*

If there is a most-used metaphor in personal essays, it may be the matryoshka doll, that tidy symbol of the disparate selves housed within us. (See also: layers of an onion, rings of a tree.) This is not an indictment of matryoshka imagery — I’ve used it, too, because it is so very apt. We contain layers, multitudes, a band of nested selves.

Of course, the concept of a multi-faceted, multi-layered self is far from new. From the five sheaths (Koshas) of being as described in the Upanishads, to Plato’s vision of the soul as a tripartite entity, brilliant frameworks for our complicated natures appear across centuries and traditions.

In the present day, the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model of psychotherapy views the mind as containing multiple parts, or subpersonalities, informed by our experiences. The parts fall into three categories — managers, exiles, and firefighters — developed to help us navigate various situations. They are led by a core Self, understood to be our true essence.

If it isn’t already clear, I fully subscribe to the concept of a layered self. I can often sense the other Carolines rattling around in there, a chorus of hopeful characters who changed or grew or never quite made it past beta.

And yet.

Any time a book, therapist, or guided meditation urged me to access my “inner child,” I felt a rash coming on. It felt treacly. Saccharine. Schmoopy. The mere mention of “Little Caroline” conjured images of a collectible porcelain figurine or something out of a horror movie, which any way you slice it is not something I’d wish to commune with.