the self myth

When I sit down to study, very often I am struck by an image of myself as a great writer. It's a cartoon image of a writer: there is some tweed, perhaps a dark coloured rug, books about the place - I am inserted into my canonical image of a writer. Sometimes I even get the music from 'Murder she Wrote' in my head, or I think about accounts of Jean Rhys driving her daughter out of her workspace in a rage. When this happens and I reflect on how ridiculous this image is, I am struck by two things: first of all how far this image is from my own situation, and second how embedded our fantasies are in the stuff of images (and then fears and the unconscious and the dream-work).
The former realisation, that I am certainly not the person I imagine in these moments, makes me stop short. I try to reflect on the writing I have actually completed and the courses I have taken: I am at a complete loss to remember the contents of the pages of work I have written. What I do remember, I feel ashamed of. I feel stifled and pompous at the same time, and the mocking voice starts: the one that tells you to stop everything.
The latter aspect, that we have so many cerebral associations between quite intact images, reminds me of my thesis and how we are all harbouring fantasy versions of ourselves based on a collection of memories. These avatars are at once constant (surely we have myriad reflections for different aspects of ourselves, or who we want to be) and interrupted (like archipelagos, marking more or less stable land in a sea of unknown); we can't really see ourselves, so the inner critic highlights and taunts those wishes the ego expresses in arrogance.