The True Self is a fantasy version of you. It’s who you were meant to be—who you should be or who you could be if you hadn’t lost your way or if life hadn’t messed you up. Your True Self contains all the best qualities and potential available to you. If you could reconnect with it, you would be able to make a different choice. You would always do the right thing.
But the True Self doesn’t exist. There’s no alternate version of you to compare yourself to.
When the present doesn’t measure up to what you imagine it could be, you might have the feeling that something is missing or wrong. You might conclude that what’s wrong—or broken—is you.
If you see the problem as something being wrong with you, you will likely try to solve it by finding a way to fix what’s broken or not working. You might attempt to construct a bread-crumb trail backward to figure out why you do the things you do instead of the things you’d prefer (or think you should prefer) doing.
You might try getting in touch with your True Self or discovering your life purpose or passion. But you are many selves, rather than a single self, so what does authentic even mean in that context? And if you don’t have a True Self, there’s no point in searching for the life-purpose cheese because whose life purpose would it be?
Belief in a True Self Isn’t Harmless.
If your status quo includes such a belief, consider the implications:
- You need to fix yourself before you can determine who you want to be or what you want to do. So some aspects of your life are either on hold or have been abandoned altogether as you attempt these fixes—sometimes energetically, sometimes halfheartedly—usually repeatedly.
. - Your ideas about how you should be are based on looking backward rather than forward.
. - Your ideas about your True Self come from your Broken Self. (Where else could they come from?) Your concept of your True Self is most likely based on what you don’t like about your current self.
. - It is hard to trust your Broken Self to restore you to your True Self and to believe you have sufficient personal agency to do it.
. - Trying to fix yourself is hard work, and it’s neither inspiring nor motivating: the best you can do is get back to where you should have been all along. That is unlikely to be compelling enough to generate a sense of urgency.
. - If you erased the experiences and beliefs that have made you who you are, you would no longer be you. Who would you be then? And what would you want? As Julian Baggini says:
I am my baggage. I am the layers that have grown on the onion, not the tiny core at the middle. We are precisely all the things we’ve accrued, the memories, the experience, the learning. If you strip away what you call the baggage, you’re stripping away precisely the things that make us…that fill us out.
Belief in a True Self reflects a static, deterministic, mechanical perspective that is at odds with the dynamic nature of our existence. It keeps us going round and round on the hamster wheel instead of creating change or moving forward.
You Are Here.
You happen to be functioning exactly the way all human beings function: you can—and do—generate multiple possible alternatives to what’s so. Not only can you imagine many scenarios that are quite different from the present, you readily and frequently compare the actual to the imaginary—and often find the actual to be wanting. That’s only a problem if you interpret it that way.
Yes, imagination is a double-edged sword. Our ability to imagine things that don’t yet exist sets us apart and has led to our continued survival thus far. It’s an essential element of creativity and invention and without it we would be unable to formulate plans or goals or even think about the future.
Imagination is also the primary source of dissatisfaction. Without it, you would be much more content—but you also wouldn’t be you.
If you’re not satisfied with the present, but there’s nothing wrong with you, you will need to redefine the problem before you can attempt to solve it. Consider that you are just who you are: the current version of you, neither broken nor exactly as you would like to be. Instead of fixing yourself, which is not only uninspiring but also impossible, how about imagining what you want to create and moving forward into that?
Based on an article published in lucidwaking on 1/21/19.
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