She told me to reduce the number of I’s I use when explaining myself.
That was my sister’s advice to me. It made sense. She explained:
It shows how self-centered you are. It’s not a good signal.
On the other hand, Kendrick Lamar says it best:
And I love myself
I can’t recall when and why she gave me this tip because I do the opposite. I address myself as ‘we’. When I have a problem:
What are we going to do.
When promising to attend an event:
We will be there no matter what.
When rebuking an action:
We don’t do that here.
However, when you attend an interview and are asked to define who you are, more often than not you will start with that pronoun — I.
I, the wholesome definition of self, is mysterious and yet ignored, adding to its open yet hidden strangeness. I have tried to explain it partly in my book, but the more I think about it, the more I find other perspectives hidden in that single, lean letter.
The first obvious fact is — it shows up when necessary.
I show up when necessary
The moment you are born, you cannot talk.
You lack words but make up for it by crying. Forgive how grammatically off this sounds, but you barely know what or who ‘I’ is. This refers to all the other languages synonymous with the identification they have for themselves.
But before long, after learning how to walk, begins the endless wishes:
I want…I want…
Thus, for a good moment at the beginning of your life, the concept of I hardly existed. If someone hit you, you’d cry. If someone fed you, you’d be quiet. If familiar faces tried to make you laugh, you’d giggle. But then ‘I’ was yet to form.
It seems emergent. The first word spoken by a baby is never ‘I’. It comes later.
Now a child can speak. It signals its self-awareness by addressing itself to others using the pronoun I. That brief interphase, before it is capable of this feat, is often ignored by AI specialists. In previous movies on the potential futures and capabilities of AI, the actors tend to ask the entity:
Are you self-aware?
Self-awareness is taken as a pivotal component in evaluating the consciousness of an AI. Children, however, are conscious before they start speaking. I, the self-referencing pronoun, elucidates this conundrum. Consciousness doesn’t have to be defended with words.
Meanwhile, parents and kin protect the children. All the while they grow and develop. Protection is necessary because the world is a harsh place. A delicate entity such as a child can get killed by the slightest of cuts or infections. Its immunity is barely formulated. It can’t hunt. It can’t speak and by extension, defend itself verbatim. It needs caring because the world is a ghetto.
The world is a ghetto with big guns and picket signs
— Kendrick Lamar
Once it can speak, it gets its words right. More through speaking and getting correction than imagining it in its mind and self-correcting without doing. I, the pronoun, comes later.
Here’s the surprising bit — even though the pronoun is well-established, it is hardly used. It helps to think of it with the aid of a rolling die.
A typical die has six faces. At any given time, only one face shows up. Each face has a one in six chance of showing up. The tendency of one particular face to show up is very small. In percentage, 1/6 equals 16.67%.
Think of the pronoun ‘I’ in the same way. It shows up even less because your word bank is more than the six faces of the die. The percentage is magnitudes less than 16.67%. Still, we remain self-aware. This much is evident when someone asks you who you are. You would then respond:
I am…
Importantly, ‘I’ is collective. It represents all the organs and organ systems inside you. It represents the beliefs you hold. It represents the image the world would want to know about you and what you would want the world to know about you.
The words following these words, ‘I am’, encapsulate this tightly packed self-referencing collection.
I am Judy Nini. I am the President of the Rotaract Club of African Nazarene University. I love music and dancing. I am dope, I mean 💁♀️.
She finishes by flipping her hair.
Your self-referencing pronoun shows up when necessary. Think of all the times when you have been inside an exam room. When deeply solving a problem, you hardly have the time to think about yourself in that manner. Especially when you have already started solving it.
Assume one of the lecturers or teachers thinks you’re cheating. She approaches you claiming you’re a cheat. The obvious response is:
No, I am not. I am not cheating.
The word pops up again. Even when you could be cheating, you would still deny it. Therein lies the other clue.
An idea is only as complex as the simplest expression of itself. The pronoun I is an expression of every individual and still an expression of only one individual. It unites us all, but at the same time, separates us. The moment you deny cheating in an exam, even though you were, you defend yourself.
Why? Because…
The world is a ghetto with big guns and picket signs
The pronoun ‘I’ cuts the story short. No need to explain away your kidneys, your heritage, or your race. Simply start by saying I. It then gives you a chance to defend yourself faster and more reliably. But it hardly exists in your common life. It only shows up when necessary.
You know how you can shield your face using your hands, forearms, or elbows when someone threatens to hit you? This is synonymous with bringing up the pronoun ‘I’. Your hands do a myriad of things but when necessary, they act as a shield. You have all the words in your repertoire, but when you need to defend yourself, ‘I’ shows up.
And the I’s have it.
Why do we do this?
The theory of Organismal Selection states why — to avoid annihilation. You don’t want people to dismiss you. You don’t want them to ignore your achievements. You exist and so you summon the most compact representation of yourself and begin by saying:
I am…
What I am trying to say is…
‘I’ is a strong pronoun.
It is the axis from which the other pronouns gain meaning. If there’s I, then there’s me. There’s also you, it, them, we, and the others you can think of in the evolving world of English.
As a simple and powerful weapon, evolutionarily speaking, it is self-defense manifest. Kendrick raps:
From a negative and letting them annihilate me
And it’s evident I’m moving at a meteor speed
Finna run into a building, lay my body in the street
Keep my money in the ceiling, let my mama know I’m free
Give my story to the children and a lesson they can read
And the glory to the feeling of the holy unseen
Seen enough, make a motherfucker scream, “I love myself!”
‘I’ exists because you love yourself.
As you should.
This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube