All eyes on the pronoun "I"

« I »: a pronoun I often ponder about.

It fascinates me how our language inscribes the delusion of identity and ego with first person pronouns. Especially in English (in contrast to the French “je” for instance), the word literally stands as a capitalized monolith when actually it gestures to the cacophony of bits and pieces - emotions, body parts, cells, microbes - that we are made of. I often joke about how “we” is a more appropriate pronoun to represent “I”: “we am Lauren” (“we are Lauren”?).

Ok, pause and cringe but think about the grammatical implications of that shift. Think of how a grammar made only of plurals might reshape our mental model of the world. In this case, English has a leg up with the second person pronoun “you” that doesn’t vary between the singular and plural (as opposed to the French “tu” and “vous”).

That being said, although “I” might only be a sliver of the reality it points to, it’s also an obvious homophone of “eye”. So pardon the cliche but I like to think it can also stand as a reminder to look and see the multiplicity within and without 👀