You Are More Than You Think

In high school, we were always writing essays. It was part of English composition class. For one essay, we were asked the write: “What makes you unique?”

I didn’t have a clue about how to address this subject, so I asked friends and family about what made me unique. I received all kinds of positive and negative answers.

I finally came to a conclusion, so I wrote, “What makes me unique is that I am always “Bob-ing.” No one else in the world does that.” Each of us is always becoming.

We all share a yearning to know ourselves, to comprehend who we are in the world. We want to find our “true self” and have been taught that if we just look deeply enough we will find it. Of course, we all need a story about who we are, how we came to be and where we are going.

No one can live every moment of one’s life as an open question. We need a recognizable identity to get us through the day. But we forget that what we call self is really only a moment truth. There is no enduring identity. As my Dad would caution me sometimes when I got smug, “People are always more than you think they are.” Shakespeare reminds us that, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.”

We need a self-image, but ought not to forget that it’s just an image: a sense of self. Finding our permanent self, no matter how much we search, just isn’t going to happen. When we think we have this self, it’s time to search again.

When we become attached to an identity of any kind – whether it’s our profession, our appearance, our talents, or special qualities we take pride in – we’ve made a partial truth absolute. When you think about it, are any of us really the same people we were a decade ago? Are we even recognizable?

It can be mind-blowing when we read an old journal, pull out clothes three sizes larger or smaller, or discover an old love letter. And think of all those plans we made that never panned out, not only because of unpredictable eternal events but because we ourselves are unpredictable. Lewis Carroll’s Alice says it so well, “Dear! Dear! How strange everything is today. I wonder if I’ve changed in the night. Let me think: Was I the same when I got up this morning?”

When I hear that someone is leading a double life, I think: “Just two?” As cognitive scientists are now discovering, the notion of a single enduring self is just a way to describe how we’ve temporarily domesticated our inner world. Identity is a provisional arrangement. Our self is really a container for our multiplicity.

The yearning for self is essential to our development but it is of course a quest that can never be fully satisfied. We can never fully grasp the infinite. Could it be that all the striving, the pushing, the climbing, the acquiring, is rooted in this yearning to know that which can never be known?

Rather than trying to define who we are, what if we sought an ever-deepening understanding of how much we are? Perhaps that’s what deeper yearning is really all about.

Here is the central insight from my essay from high school: The more we allow ourselves to unfold, the less likely we are to implode. When we hold our identities lightly, knowing that they are temporary constructions, humble absolutes, the crises and crossroads in our lives tend to be less shattering.

We’ve all experienced our “angry self” lashing out from nowhere; our “helpless self” erupting in tears when we didn’t even know we were upset; our “betraying self” sabotaging a relationship; our “sensual self” coming alive at a sunset; and our “spiritual self” melting away our self-established boundaries.

When we can embrace these “not me” moments, our more interesting “me” becomes truly alive.