'I LIKE MYSELF'

Just now, after finishing work, I lay back on my bed (not the side I sleep on) and grabbed a book I'd stopped reading months ago. It's sitting in the stack of novels that acts as a sort of bedside table for my small green lamp. Note to anyone reading: parking books by the bed (especially in a stack under a lamp) is a surefire way to stop reading them all together. Total loss of accessibility. Active reading books must be placed at the top of a stack on the coffee table or directly on the couch, in my house. 

Anyway, I pulled out this book from the stack, Like Streams to the Ocean. It's not very good, frankly. That's why I stopped reading it initially and how it ended up relegated to the sub-lamp pile. But looking at it in the stack, I remembered reading something about the author on the inside flap of the jacket when I had picked the book up in the bookstore. I can't remember what exactly, but something about this book really struck me as being written by a normal person. Like not a vaunted "author" but just some guy who got a book deal. 

So I saw this book in the stack today, and I think the Sally Rooney interview I mentioned yesterday was still on my mind, because suddenly I had a rush of compassion for this writer. I could be him one day, with a book that's mediocre and languishing half-read in someone's bedside pile. 

As I pulled the book out then, I had a sudden thought: "I like myself." It made me smile. 

That "I like myself" was brought on by a fleeting recognition of all the books that I have around, or how much time I'm spending reading, which I think has increased recently. In a rush, as I pulled this sort of bad book out from the stack, I think I felt the approximate landscape of my intellectual life and my internal life. And it gave me a nice little sense of satisfaction with myself as I am today, or as I was in that instant. 

Sensation and recognition of oneself (specifically, myself) is totally inconstant. It's surprising to me that I just felt this "I like myself" with so much clarity, and even more surprising that it was triggered by pulling a book out of a stack. As I wrote before, I've felt recently that the ways that I recognize and evaluate myself have been shifting substantially. But I suppose it should make sense that in the largely internal world I occupy now, it's my internal pursuits that shape my own relationship with my self.