There is no "real" you. There is only you, for better or worse.

One of my favorite poets is Robert Lowell, and one of my favorite Robert Lowell lines isn’t from one of his poems at all. It’s from a letter he sent Elizabeth Bishop from a mental institution in 1958:

“Talking about the past is like a cat’s trying to explain how it climbed down a ladder.”

It’s one of those lines that gets lodged in your brain and stays there long after you’ve forgotten the context. I must have read it in college—everything else from the letter wilted away, but that one line hung around. I used to think about it all the time, by itself, not remembering what led up to it. I vaguely recalled it was a letter about the progress Lowell had made in the hospital. And, given that and the talents of a cat, I assumed it was about how impossible it is to articulate your own innate talent for survival.

Then, a few years ago, I broke up with a girlfriend I was in love with. Why? Because I’m an idiot. But more specifically, because I had gotten myself into a totally self-destructive state where I thought the small things were big things and the big things were fatal things—and that I’d better end it soon or else…I don’t know…the world would end.