It’s simply an important part of yourself revealed to an audience. Not in a disingenuous way, but in a way that is helpful, consistent, and understandable to your readers.

I, as the conscious witness of my experience,

In their sense of ‘I’. And what is that self? What form does it take? One way of thinking of it, as offered by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, is as a looping pattern of abstractions. Our personality may be the most real thing in the world to each of us, but it is a fiction, a configuration, a way of thinking. It isn’t found in the meat

me, not a theory, not something to speculate about any longer.

“My creative expression must be the most important thing in the world to me (if I am to live artistically), and it also must not matter at all (if I am to live sanely).”