Ep.38: I want to be known

Hearing Father Roddy Johnston’s voice always makes me smile and a call from him, out of the blue, to wish me well, feels as warming as a dram.  Every conversation with Roddy is chewy, thick with thought, rich and rewarding.  I can’t fail but come away digesting everything we’ve talked about.  In the course of this particular conversation, nestled in between the inevitable cancer catch up and swapping of day to day details of living life alongside Covid, Roddy says something I’ve heard him say previously, it snagged me then as it does now, ‘we want to be known’. And maybe because I’ve heard him say it more than once and because Roddy has a charisma which pushes you to tuck away these things he says, sensing they’re precious, I keep coming back to it.

‘We want to be known’.  And we do.  But we want to carefully curate what is known about us.  Look at facebook, twitter, in fact all social media and you get a distilled concentrate of how each and every participant wants to be known.  Facebook doesn’t paint a portrait so much as provide a series of self-styled snapshots, group them together and you get an outline of a figure but the detail is often missing.  I doubt I’m alone in diving into the profiles and newsfeeds of both relative strangers and long lost aquaintances to see how they want to be known.  You can group us into those who want to be known for how they look; those who want to be known for what they do; those who want to be known for who and what they support and so on.  I sometimes scroll through my own newsfeed, trying to understand myself better, work out how I am wanting to be known, because I don’t think it is always so obvious to ourselves, our subconscious is hard at work here. 

And of course there’s a tsunami of information and implication locked away in those pockets of time when we don’t post anything.  What we don’t say is often way more powerful that what we do.   It took me a long time to decide to post about my cancer diagnosis, in the end it was the need and desire to express gratitude, in public, to the NHS staff who’d helped me that nudged me to it but even then I wrote it and then checked-in with David before I hit post. It was a hugely self-conscious act, a massive leap to decide to allow myself to be known as someone who has cancer but isn’t every self-conscious act just rammed with information if you go searching for it?  Looking back I’m interested that I only felt able to post after my operation, once I was cancer-free, the image of survivor, conqueror, sitting more comfortably with that carefully curated self-image than that of victim.  Even now the thought of unleashing a flood of empathy and sympathy makes me flinch, much rather the comments are ones of congratulation and celebration.  Every time.

A couple of years back I made a programme about the science and psychology of selfies.  I’d set out with the view that selfies were evidence of pure narcissism, self-obsession, they were value-less beyond quantifying just how much someone was caught up in their own image.  But after mining into the subject my position shifted.  There was narcissism for sure and I still can’t get my head round the ridiculousness of the duck-face pout, but alongside that narcissism is communication.  A selfie says so much more than just this is how I want to look, it says here I am, looking like this, in this location, doing this thing, with these people, here’s my expression, this is how I feel, all of it succinctly shouting I want to be known.

And that prompts me to remember another programme I made about what would happen to my body if I donated it to science after I died (a moot point now as I suspect, post cancer and being carved up, they wouldn’t have me).  We spent the day recording at the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification CAHID, in Dundee, with the extraordinarily compassionate staff and researchers.  I ended up in the dissection room, surrounded by chatty medical students and many, many dead bodies.   The students don’t get to know anything about the body they’re dissecting, no name, no history, nothing, everybody is anonymous, but the students named them anyway.  The body I was standing beside was named George.  I asked if I could touch him and they said I could.  Oh my, the intimacy of that act, of reaching out and touching another human being albeit one departed. I was absolutely fascinated by the tiny details, the fact he had beautifully manicured hands, the dusting of tiny hairs on his cheek and the eyelashes.  I couldn’t help being struck by the fact that when you have a baby it’s the same tiny details that snag you, their minute, perfect fingernails, the down on their skin. In both birth and death you come to the same conclusion, we are amazing.

But the fact of George’s anonymity bothered me.  While I understood the reasons why the donors remain anonymous – it makes it easy for the staff and students to retain a carefully measured distance – for me it felt wrong.  I asked Vivienne, the lead administrator, whether I’d be allowed to waive my anonymity and she said I could, I said for me it would have to be a pre-condition of my donating my body.  Because my conclusion from making the programme is that I would have offered up my body for research, in fact I was all for it and went to far as to get the paperwork, but only if ‘I were known’ in the process.  I envisaged a foot note, quite literally tied to my toes, for any students wanting to know me. (In the end David wasn’t keen on the idea of that lack of closure presented by having my body on a gurney somewhere and I respected that so the paperwork sits alongside my will, form incomplete). 

I wonder whether it’s the fact of my new found respect for my own mortality which has brought me round to the point of wanting to be known now in perhaps a way I never have before.  While this blog started out as a purely personal way of coping with my diagnosis it has become a way to be known, both for myself, for David and perhaps one day for B should she wish to read it.  Interestingly though I don’t feel the need to curate what I want to be known in the same way as I might on social media. 

The other day David’s eldest son asked me if I wasn’t scared of being so honest in this blog.  I thought about it and said ‘scared of what exactly?’. I realise I have no fear of what anyone else thinks of me so I have no fear of the consequences of being honest.  What harm can possibly come to me that is worse than facing my own mortality and that of the people I love?  If you like my writing you can read on, if you don’t, then don’t, it doesn’t matter because, no offense, but it wasn’t written for you, it was written for me.  I care less and less these days what anyone thinks of me. I’ve realised that first and foremost I want to be known to myself and that requires honesty and authenticity, even if sometimes that means facing up to uncomfortable home truths.

So here I am.