I Found Myself After I Stopped Trying
The best decision I’ve ever made was — to quit defining myself.
“You are under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.”
— Alan Watts
We usually like to label ourselves, and those around us, by a specific identity that could be based on our occupation, our likes & dislikes, our values, and/or our relationship status.
We also like the idea of fine-tuning our identity. We believe, by doing so, we become better versions of ourselves. So we tend to work hard to climb our career ladder up high until the top, we try our best to increase our wealth, and we seek people who have similar values to those that we have.
With time, our identity gets highly emphasized, by society, and by ourselves. It is usually the case until something different happens, something that makes us start questioning who we are.
Consider breakups for example; people tend to have a hard time getting over their ex-partners because they feel as if they have lost part of their identity, forever.
When something like this happens, we fail to understand it, and consequently, we start getting depressed, we lose motivation, and we become stuck inside our heads.
Time passes and we heal. Thanks to how our brains function, we stop feeling the pain but we never forget the lesson. So we finally move on but carrying with us a big shield to protect ourselves from any similar pain that could impact us later in the future.
Because of this, our identity gets reshaped, but still gets definitely emphasized; it is because of such experiences, we now believe that we have grown, we start feeling stronger, and we tend to embrace ourselves better.
We tend to overcompensate the sense of losing ourselves because of such experiences by getting more attached to our identity.
While there is nothing wrong with having an identity, there is everything wrong with defining ourselves with this identity.
Your identity is a model of the self
“The brain is an organ that builds models and makes creative predictions, but its models and predictions can as easily be specious as valid.”
— “A Thousand Brains” by Jeff Hawkins
In my previous article, “Start Living Outside Your Head”, I have mentioned that the way our brains make sense of the reality we live in is by creating a model of the world. However, to make sense of ourselves, our brains must also have a model of the self.
That is what our identity is all about; a model of ourselves which we use to help us recognize who we are, what we want, what makes us happy, and what drives us to wake up every morning.
The two models, the world and the self, are not fixed, but instead, they have the tendency to get reshaped by the things and the experiences we encounter.
This flexibility means that a better understanding of ourselves leads to a better understanding of the world and vice versa, which suggests that the two models are interconnected, and as you might expect, such interconnection is essential for personal growth and self-development.
However, there is a loophole in this system that becomes evident when we remember that, as in the case with the model of the world, we mostly use the model of the self subconsciously. As a result, we tend to take this model for granted and it becomes too difficult to be able to think of ourselves in other terms — so we end up defining ourselves by our model of the self.
Taking all of this into consideration and the fact that the two models are interconnected, we realize that defining ourselves with a specific identity could actually lead to a huge muddle.
The dilemma of self-defining
“The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.”
— “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck” by Mark Manson
The dilemma of self-defining becomes clear when we recognize that it promotes us to do everything we can to protect our identity, which will bring about the inclination to avoid anything that does not comply with what we choose to define ourselves with. Therefore, self-defining acts as a deterrent to exploring the unknown.
Avoiding the unknown could come in many shapes; for example, we could be limiting the new experiences we are willing to participate in, limiting our social interactions to a specific group of people, or preventing someone new to enter our lives.
The examples could be infinite, but there is something common happening in all of them: we are not only trying to define ourselves, but we are also trying to define our model of the world.
Hence, we get stuck in what I like to call…
The vicious cycle of self-defining
our model of the self → defines our model of the world → defines our model of the self → etc.
This means that by defining ourselves, it becomes highly unlikely that we will be able to know better than what we already know about ourselves, or even worse — what we think we know.
Self-defining leads to self-entitlement
If you are self-entitled then you become self-unaware, and once you are self-unaware, there is almost no way to know that you are self-entitled.
For a good amount of time in my life, I was clinging to an identity that made me feel unique. Ironically, my feeling of uniqueness was not coming from the positive things in my life, but rather from the problems I had.
I used to think: “my problems are unique, so I must be unique, and hence everything that happens to me should, and will be, unique” — Wow! I am actually laughing right now!
My brain, of course, was not explicitly thinking like that, but it was implicit in how I perceived life and all the challenges I was facing; I was convinced that I was incapable of changing my life. To justify this, all I had to do is to look over my past — my unique identity.
In short, I was self-entitled and I had no idea!
Self-entitlement could also come in the form in which you think you are the best and you are problem-free and that’s why you believe you should not do anything about changing your life. Self-entitlement is a spectrum, and regardless of where you are on this spectrum, you will always think that you are special one way or another. Hence, you will lack the ability to take responsibility for your mistakes and you will lack the necessary feedback to improve.
Despite the fact that I was self-unaware, I knew there was something wrong because, thanks to my limbic system, I was constantly scared and unhappy.
However, it was not until I almost lost everything in my life that I realized I am trapped and decided it’s time to break free.
Self-scrutiny is the door out, self-acceptance is the key
My identity was like my shadow, following me everywhere. To get rid of it, I had to embrace the darkness within.
Self-scrutiny is the process of examining your thoughts and emotions. Self-acceptance is embracing these thoughts and emotions without even trying to suppress them.
Even though I didn’t know at that time what exactly I was trapped in, I still anticipated that I had to contemplate myself to find answers. However, I didn’t know that it will be a continuous journey that requires little endeavor, but lots of courage.
I have learned, over the course of time, that to become truly free, one has to go through a scary process — the process of self-acceptance.
Throughout my journey, I had to accept my past, my circumstances, my weaknesses, and my fears. The scariest part, however, was accepting my thoughts.
But only then, when I had enough courage to face myself, I had the guts to analyze my thoughts and emotions thoroughly, which made me come to the conclusion that I was actually trapped in the vicious cycle of self-defining.
Then I realized that going through the process of self-acceptance once was not enough. It is a process in which we will fail constantly — but we must keep trying.
“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I will try again tomorrow.”
— Mary Anne Radmacher
I have also learned that self-awareness is a continuous process as well, which requires us to keep examining our thoughts and emotions over and over again. It requires us to trace all the parts of our identity back to their origin, accept them, and then finally — lose them.
I was progressing, I knew it because I started looking at the world from a whole new perspective that had no limits. But a world with no limits is scary, one can easily get lost — or so I thought.
What I lacked at that time though, was the answer to an important question that I was not sure how to answer anymore…
Who the hell am I?
The world is infinite, and so are you
“You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.”
― Alan Watts
As the days passed by, I noticed that every time I was asking the “Who am I?” question, I was urged to further explore beyond my current self before even trying to answer.
I was never satisfied with one fixed answer, and I will never be. Because when you know the secret to freedom, you can never accept being prisoned again.
The world has no limits, and to cope with that, we must be limitless as well.
What we can do to achieve this is to project ourselves into a higher dimension from which we can describe ourselves in terms of infinite models that are detached from our true selves.
Thinking in such terms allows us to create and destroy identities without ever losing the sense of who we are, which consequently will drive us to delve beyond ourselves, and beyond our world.
The beauty of this becomes even more evident when we realize that accepting or rejecting an identity never means that it’s accepted or rejected forever. The identities will always be subject to change.
Personal development then becomes nothing but to let ourselves go with the world and allow it to keep changing us constantly.
If we do that, then we prevent ourselves from ever being defined with any kind of identity, and rather we have the possibility to adopt as many identities as we want, which we can use to expand beyond our current self at any point in time.
In summary…
“I say don’t find yourself. I say never know who you are. Because that’s what keeps you striving and discovering.”
— Mark Manson
