I’m Nobody! Who are you?

The second of January is a bank holiday in Scotland, so I guess I can say that the actual new year begins today for the majority of us, when we return to work. A weird one, a Friday dangling at the end of the week is a kind of dress rehearsal. This is how children must feel when attending those mock/preparatory days before starting school to become familiar with the new teacher and the uncomfortable uniform. 

Today I think of ‘I’m Nobody’, one of the very few poems Emily Dickinson published during her lifetime. It’s about identity, which ultimately is the topic of this end and beginning of the year: to build a better version of ourselves, a new chapter, a new diary, a new notebook, to finally read that self-help book that Santa left under the tree. 

But if I want to become a better me, at what point will I stop being myself? How much of my New Year’s resolutions are actually an attempt to escape? What’s the version of myself I’m trying to improve? Will I be able to hold to it? Will it be worthy? Because, more importantly, who am I?

I’m nobody! Who are you? 

(First published version, 1891)

I’m nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!

They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day

To an admiring bog! 

If you want to know more about the poem, here’s an analysis of the rhyme, the figures and the themes – or what the person who wrote this entry thinks the themes are. Also, the Emily Dickinson Archive is online, and you can read the original handwritten poem.