I have been, I guess, unofficially polling people about how they refer to themselves inside their own brain: “I”, “[name]”, or “we”.

Most people say “I”.

I always think of myself as “we” or “Ryan” or “you”—like there’s some much smarter dude issuing orders from the command center, but then they get acted out by a bumbling dumbass who only listens / gets it right half the time. So I’ll think, “What have we done?” or “Ryan, you fool! You’ve doomed us to hell!”

Like, sometimes when I’m walking around Berkeley alone on mushrooms, I’ll think, in a very gentle voice, “Hey Ryan, why don’t you have a girlfriend? Maybe that wouldn’t be a bad idea. I don’t know, why the heck not, man?”

Hmm!

On a similar note, whenever I record a voicemail, I use “we”: “Leave a message, and if we feel like it, we’ll call you back.”

Like the Sand People, I do this to hide my numbers. Plus, God knows I love to shake em around a bit, you know???