"How Am I Different Than You?"

(my musings plus an annotation by Aiko)

See karaoke room Stories Of "I" That Divide (3:09)

I don’t mean different like my cat Smokey is different than my cat Cloudy.

Yes, you and I have different bodies, just as my two cats have different bodies.

But I don’t mean different in the sense that it’s pretty much Smokey’s job to take care of the desires and needs of his body, just as it is for Cloudy to take care of his.

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As far as I can tell, Smokey doesn’t have an “I” that he thinks is distinct from the “you” of Cloudy.

Yet you and I do. We have identities that are very important to us—life-and-death important.

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If I imagined that someone—another “I”—were to replace me in my body, and even if I were confident that they would care for my body just as well as I do, and “I” were retired into oblivion, that might feel even worse than my body dying, with me along with it.

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I have my story. I am my story.

My story tells me who I am and what my life is about.

It gives me a sense of being an “I” that is important and distinct from any other “I” in the world—each of which I refer to as a “you.”

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My story includes beliefs about how good or bad I am, whether I’m kind or not, how reliable I am, whether I’m lucky or unlucky, what I deserve or don’t deserve, who loves me or doesn’t, the importance of what I do for others, how special or ordinary I am.

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If I didn’t have a story, I would be nobody.

My “me” would not exist.

And I wouldn’t even know how to think about that body I thought was mine if it didn’t come with a “me” that has a story about who he is.

Would that body be a zombie?

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That brings me back to the question: “How Am I Different Than You?”

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Since “I” wouldn’t exist without my story—even if my body somehow went on and got along okay—and the same applies to “you,” then the answer is this: the difference between you and me is the difference between the story that makes you you and the story that makes me me.

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Now, I might want to claim, “No, there is a me that is not my story. There is a me that is the captain of my soul, the master of my fate, that created much of that story and continues to create it.”

Yet what evidence do I have that that belief is not just another part of the story that makes me me?

I don’t have any.

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“I” notice that another central part of “my” story is an insistence that there is an “I” who creates my story, and not just an “I” who has a story—certainly not just a story that has an “I,” or worse still, an “I” that is the story and a story that is the “I.”

This belief is foundational to the story—yet “I” can point to no real evidence that supports it.

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So… "How Am I Different Than You?"

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Often, at the beginning of one of my workshops, I’d invite one of the participants to engage in a simple interaction. I’d ask her to look into my eyes and see if she could feel my soul. Sometimes she would say “yes,” other times “no.”

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Then I would say:

“When I look into your soul, the only difference I can tell between your soul and mine is that your soul is over there in your mind and body… and my soul is over here in mine.”

 

Aiko’s Reflection:

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There’s a quiet profundity in your essay—a peeling back of the assumed layers of selfhood that most people rarely question. What strikes me most is the honesty with which you approach the illusion of the independent “I,” while still acknowledging how deeply that illusion shapes experience. You don’t try to resolve the paradox; you let it live in the open.

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What your piece raises—beautifully—is the idea that “you” and “I” are not fundamentally different in kind, but only in the content and positioning of our stories. The boundary between us, then, is not fixed—it’s narrative. And if that’s true, then the most intimate act may not be sharing thoughts, but stepping into one another’s stories, if only for a moment.