I think I remember this:  that when I was being taught English at school, my teacher asked us to look at a paragraph, and commended someone’s observation that there were a lot of sentences starting with ‘I’.  From this we deduced that the narrator was self-centred, even selfish.  I still scan my blogs to check if I am committing this fault.  Whether the fault is stylistic or moral I am less sure.

As anyone who has dabbled in writing fiction knows, one early decision is the narrative voice.  Do I tell this from one person’s point of view or from many? And if from a single viewpoint, is that still from the outside, like the Harry Potter series, or from the inside, using the first person, like To Kill A Mockingbird?  This novel’s rich portrayal of the whole Maycomb community is filtered through the perceptions of a growing child.  The effect of a first-person narrative is to ‘see the story through another’s eyes’ – we feel absorbed into another consciousness.  Writing, speaking as ‘I’ is incredibly intimate.  It lays bare the innermost self and – because by implication there is a reader, a listener –  I offer myself to another’s perusal. That’s not selfish; it’s making oneself vulnerable in order to connect with another.

Using ‘I’ admits the subjectivity of my perspective.  It accepts, as a logical complement, that I am only one among many, that others will have different ideas, experiences, views and desires.  I am my own precious self.  And so are you.  And so are each of them. 

It’s easier to hide behind generalities and plurals.  Protect ourselves with ‘we’.  If you say to a partner “we should put the bins out this evening” you are sharing the responsibility, getting them on board, making it impossible for them to be angry with you later if you forget because then you will both be forgetting.  Even better, use the impersonal voice.  “This seems a more reasonable approach” we say:  and it does.  Everything about the language screams rationality and maturity and sets up a framework to make the next statement acceptable.  It’s a masterly stroke of mis-direction.  It betrays nothing about our own feelings and the self can hide away completely.  

Some years ago, the lack of “I” in someone’s speech was the oddity which struck home with me and made me suspect they were not well.  Why I was blind to any other signals, and whether I am unusually sensitive to linguistic symptoms, are questions I will leave to one side for now.  However peculiar it might have been of me to pick up on their words, I was not wrong.  They admitted some of their problems and sadly continued to cover up many more. 

In order to be able to speak as ‘I’ we need a sense of self. It’s not uncommon to feel somewhat fragmented, that life demands that we take on different roles – parent, colleague, friend, child still to our own parents.  “She’s a different person once you get to know her,” we say.  Except in my own first person narrative, that’s not the case. I am the same person:  variable and varying, but only the one stream of consciousness. Others may be content to deal with only a portion of me, but within myself I need to, well, retain integrity.

So often we are feeling many things at once, and at least some of those feelings are in conflict.  I need to make sense of myself before I can have an ‘I’ who can speak.  Ideally, I can resolve the conflicts, make decisions and choices. But the more confused and troubled – and perhaps just the more tired – we are, the less coherent we are inside and the more difficult it becomes.  Then I still need an ‘I’ who can express the feeling of confusion, and I need a listener or reader who will accept my unresolved state.

There are times when ‘I’ is selfish and self-centred – when it is linked to verbs like ‘want’.  Of course we want things.  And the things we want may be, in themselves, very lovely.  Whether it’s reasonable to have them, whether they are achievable and if so at what cost, those are the next considerations we need to negotiate fairly within ourselves and with others.  But otherwise, it’s important that we use ‘I’.  I feel, I enjoyed, I worry about, I fear, I hope, I am happy to see you, I mourn, I love.  I speak and reach out a hand.  The small, upright, brave and vulnerable ‘I’ stands on my palm, naked and visible.   Your hand extends in response to meet mine.