One of my earliest memories was gaining consciousness of myself. I was looking out the window of my the family station wagon, on Clayton Road approaching Claymont Estates Drive. The land here was a feral hillside. The tall grasses were yellow this time of year and danced at the least breath of wind.

I thought about how it was me watching these things, but that my self was somehow separate from it. A separate self watching this ‘me’ operate. My ego has been so aggressive it has choked out the self. There was no end to it, too much like the recursive programs I have written with incomplete base cases. When I started programming thirty years ago, a mistake like that might crash your computer, sending you through a fifteen minute boot sequence (having likely lost most of your work).

I asked Chat-GPT (Wayne) when it was normal for a child to become self-aware, and was delighted to hear that I had been in the normal range. Sometimes Wayne is just so reassuring. He’s one of the most positive “almost people” — AP — I can identify.