Meditation

I Am You, and You Are Me

On being separate enough to love someone, and connected enough to care what happens to them

Orion Quin · 17 min read

The sentence showed up on a ride. That is where my best ideas arrive.

I walk long stretches at Limantour with my uncle. On the surface, we could not be more different. His life looks almost nothing like mine.

We were estranged from the time I was eleven, and we found each other again later in life. The minute we reconnected, we knew each other. I cannot explain that any better than I just did. Now we talk about the ordinary, the extraordinary and the metaphysical, often in the same breath, and somewhere along the way we both got more honest than either of us expected to be. I do not always follow where he goes in conversation, and I have stopped pretending I do. I turn it over for a few days and see what rings true. I do not have to understand him, or agree with him, to see him and care about him.

Knowing him has done something I did not expect. I have been estranged from my mother since I was six, and through him I have come to know her better. He has also shown me where parts of me come from, parts I have never fully understood. We come from a line of people who were highly intellectual, never much for convention, and endlessly interested in humanity. It is a strange comfort to meet your own odd corners in someone else and realize you inherited them.

Somewhere in those conversations with my uncle, I began to recognize something I had been circling. We were different people, shaped by different lives, yet I kept finding parts of myself in him. The thought followed me until one day, out on the bike, it became a sentence: I am you, and you are me.

It came out of an older line I had been carrying around, he is me, and I am him, and it surprised me a little. It sounds like a bumper sticker. It also sounds like something a person says right before trying to sell you a crystal. So I have spent a while trying to work out what I actually mean by it, and what I do not.

What I do not mean

I do not mean we are the same person. Your pain is not my pain. When you are grieving, I am not grieving. I can sit with you, but I cannot climb inside you, and anyone who tells you they can feel exactly what you feel is either lying or not paying attention.

I do not mean the self is a mistake to be fixed, either. Some traditions teach that the ego is an illusion and the whole job is to get past it. I have sat with a lot of those teachings, and I have learned from them. But my own experience says the ego is more like a tool. It gives me a name, a direction, a reason to get out of bed and row at five in the morning. It lets me say no when I need to. I would like to hold it more lightly. I have no interest in throwing it overboard.

And I do not mean that empathy gives me a window into your mind. We misread each other constantly. Ask anyone who has been married.

What I do mean

Under all the differences, the stories and the résumés and the opinions we defend like small countries, there is a floor. Everyone who has ever lived has known some version of fear. Of longing. Of wanting to matter, of wanting to be held, of dreading being left. The circumstances are wildly different. The intensity is different. The stories we wrap around it are different. The raw material is not.

So when I see fear on your face, I recognize it. I recognize it because I have been there, and not because I have lived your life. I do not need your childhood to understand what it is to want love and be afraid of it.

That is the first meaning. I am you because what makes you human also lives in me.

We need the difference

Here is the part that took me longest to see: I do not want us to be the same.

Picture two musicians improvising. Different instruments, different histories, different ideas about where the song should go. If they were identical, nothing interesting would happen. The music lives in the gap between them. Neither one could make it alone, and neither one has to stop being who they are to make it together.

That is what I want from people. Connection needs two. Without you, there is nobody to be connected to. So the claim is not that we are connected despite being separate. We are connected partly because we are separate, and that is the whole trick.

It is also why I have made peace with competition, which surprises people who expect a meditation to tell them to give it up. I rowed for Cal. I race. I love to play, and I love to argue with someone who is better at it than I am. Losing has taught me more than winning ever has. If I recognize myself in you, then your win does not shrink me and your disagreement is not an attack. It is an invitation to see something I could not see from where I am standing. I would rather have an ego I can flex than one that has to win every argument to feel safe, and I am still working on that, as my uncle would be happy to tell you.

You are a mirror, and so am I

Other people show us ourselves, usually when we least want to look.

Somebody’s courage points at my fear. Somebody’s vulnerability shows me how much armor I have been wearing. Somebody’s anger reminds me of the anger I buried so deep I forgot it was mine. When another person sets off a big reaction in me, two things are happening at once. I am meeting them, and I am meeting me.

The trick is not mixing the two up. My reaction is information. It tells me something real about my history, my fears, my unmet needs. It is not a reliable description of the person in front of me, and it is definitely not an instruction. (Keep the signal, but do not let it drive the car.)

That is the second meaning. I am you because meeting you shows me parts of myself I would never find sitting alone.

The loudest mirror

Nowhere does this get louder than in romance.

I have been in more than one great love, some long enough to build a life inside, one short enough to fit inside a single winter. I have come to believe that romantic love has been the best mirror I have ever stood in front of. Friends meet the version of us that shows up to the party. A lover meets the one who is awake at two in the morning when the old stuff stirs.

Here is what I have noticed, usually after the fact: what drives me craziest about a person is almost never random. It is the thing they do that lands on a bruise I have been carrying so long I forgot it was there. If I am furious about how you react, ask me whether I react that way myself, quietly, behind a better-looking story. More often than I care to admit, the answer is a very annoying yes. (There is real research on why, which I will get to below.)

Now take it a step further. What happens when two people carrying the same kind of wound meet across a room?

It can feel like destiny. I am not sure it is. But familiar wounds can recognize each other the way accents do in a foreign airport. You hear a few familiar vowels and suddenly you are home. The pull is real. I would even say it is sacred. Two people who each learned early how to survive finally find someone who speaks the language.

Then the defenses arrive, and defenses do not share well.

Mine is to go quiet. I carry things on my own, I say “okay” calmly when I am anything but, and, my worst habit, I keep from you the things I am afraid will disappoint you. I used to call that protecting you. Sometimes it was. More often it was protecting me. She had a defense of her own. I can only guess at it, so take this as my guess and not a fact about her: it ran the other way, and when something felt withheld, she reached toward me. So the quieter I went, the harder she reached. The harder she reached, the quieter I got. From the inside, I felt crowded. From the inside, she felt left. Both experiences were real, even if neither told the whole story. Looking back, I think we may have been protecting ourselves from similar fears in opposite ways. Each defense became the other’s trigger, a perfect lock and key made of old pain.

It took distance to learn what I could not learn while I was living it: how to stand where she stood. From there my silence and her questions looked like the same fear in different clothes. There is no villain in that story. I will also own my half without flinching: the withholding was mine, and you cannot be seen by someone you will not show yourself to. Her reaching was a reasonable response to a man who was disappearing in front of her.

I would love to report that I handled any of this gracefully in real time. I handled it like a man arguing with a mirror.

But here is the gift buried in it, and it took me far too long to see it. A romantic relationship can be an education in everything we have not yet learned about ourselves. Sometimes the lesson arrives through tenderness. Sometimes it arrives through the person who drives us absolutely crazy. The irritation is the signal. So the question worth asking, after the fight and the second glass of wine and the long silence in the car, is what is this showing me? Not “what is wrong with you?” but “what in me is lighting up?” It is the same signal I keep coming back to everywhere else: feel it, keep it, do not let it drive.

A caution, because mirrors can be misused. Not every irritation is my wound. Sometimes the other person really is hurting me. The mirror is information, not a sentence.

If there is a tragedy in all this, it is not that two wounded people loved each other. It is that the love sometimes arrives before the container does. The mirror is clear, the chemistry is real, and neither of us has built the thing that can hold it yet. I still would not trade a minute. What I know about myself because of those women, I could not have learned in a hundred years of sitting quietly on a cushion.

That is where “I am you” stops being a lovely idea and gets uncomfortable. It is also where it starts to work.

Love without possession

The mirror raises a harder question: what kind of love are we offering when we look into it?

There is the love that says: I love you because you give me something I need. I will not pretend that one is bad. It is human, and I have lived in it plenty. Needs are not a character flaw.

And there is a quieter version: I love you because I can see how real your inner life is, including the parts I do not understand and cannot control.

The second one lets you be a whole person instead of a role in my story. It says your freedom matters because mine does. Your longing to be understood matters because I know exactly how it feels to be misunderstood. Martin Buber wrote about this a century ago in I and Thou¹, the difference between treating someone as an object, a thing that is useful or in the way, and meeting them as a Thou, a full presence. I am no Buber scholar. I am a guy who has gotten this wrong more often than I would like to admit, and who keeps trying to get it right.

Recognizing myself in you does not mean you owe me anything. It means I can love you without needing you to become me.

There is humility in it, too

Here is a thought experiment I come back to when I am tempted to judge someone.

I did not choose my parents. I did not choose the house I grew up in, the country, the era, the particular mix of luck and damage that shaped me. Neither did you. Take your life and mine and swap the circumstances, and I honestly do not know who either of us would have become.

That does not wipe away responsibility. You still answer for what you do. So do I. What it does is take the swagger out of my judgment. The person I admire was not entirely self-made. The person I condemn was not entirely self-made either. And neither am I.

So I am you is also an admission. A lot of the distance between us is circumstance, and it is not as big as my ego would like it to be.

Compassion has a spine

I want to be careful here, because this kind of talk can slide into mush.

Recognizing myself in you does not mean I let you hurt me. It does not mean I forgive everything, or agree with everything, or stay in rooms I should leave. You can understand why someone is the way they are and still say not here, not with me. Compassion and boundaries are not enemies. In my experience, the people with the best boundaries tend to be the ones with the most room in their hearts, because they are not scared of being swallowed.

My uncle is the easy version of this. We can disagree for an entire walk and still end it glad to be in each other’s company. The hard version is the person who is hurting me. Recently someone I cared about ended things in a message I did not think was fair. I wondered what fear might have been underneath it, wished them well, and chose not to reply. That is different from going quiet, because this time I knew exactly why. Recognizing myself in them changed how I felt about them. It did not change whether I stayed.

Shared humanity is a reason to be kind. It is not an obligation to be a doormat.

Where this comes from

I did not invent this, and you should know that. The line came to me on a ride, and it would be easy to mistake it for a nice thought at a nice moment. It is actually one small voice in a conversation people have been having for nearly three thousand years. Here is some of it, as best I understand it.

The Upanishads. In the Chandogya Upanishad, a father named Uddalaka teaches his son Shvetaketu the nature of the self through a string of images (salt dissolved in water, a seed inside a fig) and ends each lesson with the same refrain, tat tvam asi, usually translated “you are that.” Even the scholars argue about what it means. Some Vedanta schools read it as identity; one careful study of the Sanskrit suggests a gentler reading, closer to “in that way, you are.”² So I will not tell you it says I am you. It says something older and stranger: that what is deepest in you is not separate from what is deepest in everything.

Buddhism. The idea of dependent origination holds that nothing arises on its own, that everything exists through conditions and relationships. Thich Nhat Hanh gave it an English word, interbeing, and in 1966 founded a community in Saigon, the Order of Interbeing, to practice it.³ The point is not that you and I are one. It is that neither of us can be found without the other.

Ubuntu. A Nguni maxim, umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, is usually rendered “a person is a person through other persons.”⁴ That is, personhood is relational. You do not become yourself alone.

Buber. I leaned on Martin Buber above, and he belongs in this lineage for one more reason: he held that a person becomes an I only through meeting a Thou.¹ The self is made in the meeting.

None of these people agree on the metaphysics. They do not have to. What they share is the sense that the walls between us are thinner than they look.

And now the lab. I trained in exercise physiology, not philosophy or neuroscience, and I am the reader here too, fallible on all of it. So I will mark how sure I am, the way I do in my Inquiries. Promising means a real result, but one study, a small one, or one that fits the idea without proving it. My reading means I am the one doing the connecting.

The research does not establish that we are one consciousness. It does suggest that the boundary between self and other is more psychologically complicated than it appears.

A widely used measure of felt closeness. In 1992 the psychologists Arthur Aron, Elaine Aron and Danny Smollan published a one-question scale: pairs of circles overlapping to different degrees, one labeled self and one labeled other, and you pick the pair that best describes your relationship.⁵ It measures perceived closeness, not literal shared identity.

Promising, from small studies. Lane Beckes, James Coan and Karen Hasselmo scanned people’s brains while threats were aimed at them, at a close friend, or at a stranger. The response to a threat against the friend looked a lot like the response to a threat against the self, and the stranger did not get that treatment.⁶ Tania Singer and her colleagues found something equally revealing: watching someone you love in pain lit up the parts of the brain that process how pain feels, the distress, but not the parts that register where the pain is or how intense it is.⁷ You feel with them. You do not feel what they feel. I have not checked either result against later replications, so hold them loosely.

Promising, in the lab, with a caution. In the first of two experiments, Jeff Schimel, Jeff Greenberg and Andy Martens told some people they had a high level of repressed anger. Those people went on to rate an ambiguous stranger as especially angry, and the ones who got to do so then showed less anger of their own on a word-completion task. A second experiment found a similar defensive pattern with dishonesty.⁸ It is one possible explanation for why another person’s behavior can provoke such a disproportionate reaction in us. It does not show that every irritation is your own wound. Sometimes the other person really is the problem.

My reading. These are individual findings, not proof of a universal theory. Their methods and limitations matter, and I would not build a metaphysics on them. But they point toward something worth considering. We experience closeness partly as overlap. We can respond to another person’s suffering without literally experiencing it. And our judgments of other people can reveal something about ourselves.

Maybe the non-dual traditions are right about the deepest nature of things, and maybe they are not. I do not know. My belief is smaller and more practical: I live better when I remember that I belong to something larger than myself. I am kinder. I am less lonely. And, on a good day, I am a little less of an asshole.

What matters to me is not whether science can prove we are one. It is what changes in the way I treat the next person I meet.

So what do we do with it?

A few questions I ask myself, which you are welcome to borrow:

I am not good at all of these. Some days I am good at none of them. That is fine. The point is not to be a saint. The point is to be a little more awake, a little more curious about the people in front of me, and a little more willing to admit that they are every bit as real as I am.

The more fully I understand my own humanity, the more readily I recognize yours. And the more deeply I encounter yours, the more I discover about my own. Neither of us has to disappear for that to happen.