How much can I really say about myself? How much do I really know about myself to begin with? I think I know things, but then I think of other things that seem to contradict the first things. Maybe personalities function, not in a 2D world like I thought, but rather in a 3D world where the interactions of the various elements that make us up tangle and twist around and through each other.
The question of what exactly "I" is is such a fascinating one, and so complex. So many things have gone into who "I" is: my parents, my siblings, my teachers, where I lived, my friends, what I was like in the preexistence... I used to marvel, when I was younger, that Heavenly Father knew us better than we know ourselves, but as I've gotten older, I've come to understand how that can be -- and why it needs to be. Sometimes you just don't understand yourself, whether it be because your perspective is too tied up in the situation, or because you're too complex even for yourself to comprehend or make sense of. Isn't that a great comfort, knowing that He knows you? All of you. What a mercy and a blessing that is.
That being said, I've been thinking about myself lately, trying to get a handle on myself. Think of the staggering number of roles I play in my life, all simultaneously: I am myself, I am my father's daughter, my mother's daughter (those are different, I think), my sisters' sister, my brothers' sister, friend to some, indifferent acquaintance to others, roommate, that girl in seminar who won't be quiet, employee, colleague, confidant, that friendly salesgirl from that one shoe store, the person walking down the other side of the street, student, teacher, potential wife, future mother, childhood playmate, the girl waiting at the bus stop with a book and an iPod, return missionary, no one at all to many, many people. Am I what I am, or the sum of what people see me as? I'm inclined to believe the first, but people's perceptions of me still must be taken into account, surely, in the definition of who I am. The only one who really sees the who of me is God -- I certainly don't. Fascinating. Will we know someday?
you're one in a million ;)
ReplyDeleteThanks, Bekah! :)
ReplyDeleteHere's the most true thing I've read about in terms of a believer's understanding of self.
ReplyDelete"Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation [which accounts for it] that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation relates itself to its own self. Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short it is a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two factors. So regarded, man is not yet a self.
In the relation between two, the relation is the third term as a negative unity, and the two relate themselves to the relation, and in the relation to the relation; such a relation is that between soul and body, when man is regarded as soul. If on the contrary the relation relates itself to its own self, the relation is then the positive third term, and this is the self.
Such a relation which relates itself to its own self (that is to say, a self) must either have constituted itself or have been constituted by another.
If this relation which relates itself to its own self is constituted by another, the relation doubtless is the third term, but this relation (the third term) is in turn a relation relating itself to that which constituted the whole relation.
Such a derived, constituted, relation is the human self, a relation which relates itself to its own self, and in relating itself to its own self relates itself to another. Hence it is that there can be two forms of despair properly so called. If the human self had constituted itself, there could be a question only of one form, that of not willing to be one’s own self, of willing to get rid of oneself, but there would be no question of despairingly willing to be oneself. This formula [i.e. that the self is constituted by another] is the expression for the total dependence of the relation (the self namely), the expression for the fact that the self cannot of itself attain and remain in equilibrium and rest by itself, but only by relating itself to that Power which constituted the whole relation. Indeed, so far is it from being true that this second form of despair (despair at willing to be one’s own self) denotes only a particular kind of despair, that on the contrary all despair can in the last analysis be reduced to this. If a man in despair is as he thinks conscious of his despair, does not talk about it meaninglessly as of something which befell him (pretty much as when a man who suffers from vertigo talks with nervous self-deception about a weight upon his head or about its being like something falling upon him, etc., this weight and this pressure being in fact not something external but an inverse reflection from an inward experience), and if by himself and by himself only he would abolish the despair, then by all the labor he expends he is only laboring himself deeper into a deeper despair. The disrelationship of despair is not a simple disrelationship but a disrelationship in a relation which relates itself to its own self and is constituted by another, so that the disrelationship in that self-relation reflects itself infinitely in the relation to the Power which constituted it.
This then is the formula which describes the condition of the self when despair is completely eradicated: by relating itself to its own self and by willing to be itself the self is grounded transparently in the Power which posited it."
--Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death