Extended Self

“15 to 35” Part 5

I moved from my home in Los Angeles to Pittsburgh three months ago. I just started grad school at Carnegie Mellon at the ripe old age of 36. For a number of reasons—none of which involve the health of our relationship—my husband stayed in LA. My husband, my beautiful and incredibly empathetic three-legged wonder-dog Bella, my apartment, my furniture, my in-laws, my friends, my colleagues, my collaborators, my company, my artistic and business partners are all in Los Angeles. And I am here in Pittsburgh, learning a new field, meeting new people, braving the cold.

My husband, Chi, helped me move in August. Since then he’s visited twice. The first time he flew into New York City for a day and then took a MegaBus down to Pittsburgh. After he arrived at the bus depot downtown, he took a cab to CMU and met me outside of my building. We went up to my office. I packed up my stuff. We took the city bus together to my apartment. We climbed the stairs (everything in Pittsburgh is uphill). I unlocked the door. He took off his backpack, and I took off my jacket. I held him to me, and I buried my head in his chest, and I sobbed. I sobbed, loudly for a longtime. He probably did too, but I was too consumed by my own feelings—self-pity, mostly—to remember now.

As the weekend went on, my feelings became more difficult to parse out. We ate junk food together, went shopping, sat for hours at a bar talking about the people in our life and our art, and we started scheming our future projects. It was just like a laid-back weekend at home, except that this wasn’t our home. It was Pittsburgh, the place where I live now. It’s hard to even type that—I live here—becuase it implies that he lives there, and I love there, and I love him. After ten years of living and working together, our life didn’t look so much like our life anymore. If felt wrong for us to sit in that bar and pretend like it did.

In class, we were creating visualizations of a relationship through communication metadata (email, texts, messenger). We were thinking about how we value our virtual possessions. How an email conversation is not the same as a box of love letters. So, we were reading Russell Belk’s “Possessions and the Extended Self.” Our possessions, Belk explains, are an extension of ourself. That’s why old love letters are so precious. And it’s not just our material possessions, our own body parts and even our family members that are extensions of self. Belk says,

“Our accumulation of possessions provides a sense of past and tells who we are, where we have come from, and perhaps where we are going.”

My husband and I have often discussed my tendency to think of him as an extension of myself. I might, for example, feel the need to apologize for him in public, as if his actions were mine. Or, more often, argue against him in a group, not because I disagree with him, but to temper his argument, make it more palatable, or just to separate myself from him. I tell him that it’s tough for me not to see what I say and what he says collectively as the sum of us. After all, “you are the company you keep (Bateson).”

My wedding vows:

This is my life.

I give it to you.

I need you to have it.

Because every time I hand you a little piece of me,

You turn it over, show me its miracles,

And teach me to believe.

I will protect you,

Fight for you,

And care for you.

I will be honest with you.

I will open my arms to all you have to offer.

Our life will be a life of faith.

A life lived through a wall of windows in Bushwick,

On the checkered dining room placemats,

At the sidewalk coffee shop at midnight,

And in your eyes

That make me want to celebrate,

Even through our tears.

I love you, Chi.

I feel at sea, untethered from my life, without possessions, without being possessed. This is not the same life we had three months ago. Three months ago we lived our life. Our life is decidedly no longer my life. Our life is now the sum of two lives: mine and his.

I have to tell myself, “I am me. I am not we.” We is something we have created together. We is something we both possess, something that we give each other, an extension of selves, but not our selves. We has made my self a better self. We has made my self bigger — so much bigger that it now extends across the country, from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh.

Belk, Russell. Possessions and Self. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 1988.