A Paradox of Being Human
To say I don’t know who I am is a fallacy.
I am creating who I am. There is no version that already exists that I have to discover and then embody. I might not “know” who I am but that’s because I’ve misattributed knowing myself to being an exact science. I don’t know who I am; who we are is not an entity, it is an action. It’s not about knowing who I am, it’s about being me.
There’s no riff between the different versions of myself that I want to be. There’s no version of me who has it all, as I often catch myself thinking. There’s infinite possibilities and my actions have consequences but there’s also something so freeing about realizing that what I do today is just that: what I do. It’s true, there is an infinite array of other things I could be doing right now. But then I wouldn’t be sitting in the middle of campus, pausing to write this. There’s no guarantee that there is anything better you could be doing right now.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t have priorities and that hard work doesn’t pay off. But it is to say that none of us is ever going to do it all. To grapple with the question of “do I know who I am?” is pretty darn demonstrative that if you don’t, you’re trying to. So you’re well on your way.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) postulates that thoughts lead to feelings, feelings lead to actions, actions lead to results. Based in the aforementioned assumption, the therapeutics of CBT target changing our thought patterns to change our results (our lives). In addition to simply being more mindful—a key component of CBT—what ifffff, by changing how we act, we can change how we think, also changing our results? I bring this up as evidence for my hypothesis that maybe through BEING who we are we can come to an understanding of who we think we are. I am leaning into the belief that through showing up as we are, doing what it is makes us feel whole, and no longer waiting for when we think we’re pretty enough or silly enough or accepted enough or worthy enough to do so, we can come to know our nature. Perhaps we can, to an extent change how we think via thinking, but I gander that it’s more effective to take action. My parents always told my sisters and I, actions speak louder than words.
Half the time, I don’t know who I think I am. A lot of the time, who I think I am gets clouded by who I think I should be. And then it’s really hard to tell who the heck Fiona is—let alone “Free to be Fi.” But that’s the fear talking, the fallacy I picked up somewhere along the way. Who I am is not a thought to be had or a thing to be known; who I am is a practice. It is an act of embodiment. There’s no stake involved, either, because it is actually natural to do. Frantically trying to discover and pinpoint exactly “who I am” is my ego talking. Acting like the sky will fall if I don’t figure out the perfect course-plan is absurd. Yes, school really matters. Yes, I want to be successful. Yes, I want to be an awesome human being. Yes, I care about making the world better and acting with integrity. But none of that is reliant on me having my entire life figured out or me having a fixed set of traits and routines that combine to form a steady version of who I am. Who we are cannot be completely known. Loads of what we do is delegated by our subconscious mind, and, heck, the more scientists discover about consciousness and the brain, the less they know for certain!
Release yourself from the pressure of knowing exactly who you are. We might never know. Or we might know for a moment, before God laughs, we have our lives shaken up, and then we don’t know again! And, even if claim to know, there’s nothing stopping everyone else from having a completely different version of you in their brain. An infinite variety of people exist within you. Who you are today is a conglomeration of the roots of who you were and the seeds of you are becoming. You can only see slivers of the mystery that you are. So, explore it. Experience it. Embody it. We are not meant to have the answers, and if we are at odds with who we are, then we have a choice: to take action or not to take action.