Interlude I: The Doppelgänger

Two weeks ago, I was sitting on the Thomson House terrasse, drinking iced coffees and pretending to work on my dissertation. There was a sense of gleeful energy: the end of the semester before the comedown of grades, the start of warm weather but not yet the lazy hot days of summer. The drunken med students, congratulating each other on their cleverness and sharing harrowing stories of learning how to do operations, came and went. As it approached evening, some science bros sat down on one side of me. They ordered beers and I could hear them chatting animatedly about the process of necrosis, about how it was studied in rats, about the sinister charisma of their one supervisor. As I drifted in and out of attention, I heard a voice to my other side begin to speak in strangely familiar tones. “Look, you go to grad school, and they set out all of these expectations for you, but they’re not yours and you can get trapped in them. I want to feel like I have space to think!” She paused and ordered a drink — memory colours this in as a Manhattan, but I know this to be my own invention — and continued, “It’s my life, I want to be the sort of person who has interesting experiences, and you can’t defer that indefinitely. At a certain point, you’re just someone who works and works, and for what end? Sure, some profs care about you, but the interests of the institution aren’t your best interests!”

The woman spoke in my voice, in tones and idioms I thought of as my own, offering complaints that I had made to friends and written in my journal with increasing desperation, and yet, hearing them from an unfamiliar source, they sounded dry, trite, therapeutic. I was gripped by the vertiginous sense that I was nothing more than the mechanical sum of my social influences, that I was nobody, that I was anybody. As I paid the bill for my iced coffees and left, I couldn’t bear to look directly at her face, but I caught the flash of bold red lipstick, so much like my own, and wished that the earth would swallow me whole.