Who Are You Really

THE QUESTION YOU HAVE BEEN AVOIDING 🌑

Most people live their entire lives at a comfortable distance from the most important question available to them, which is not the question of what they want or where they want to go or what they want to have or who they want to be seen as, but the prior question, the one that makes all the other questions answerable or reveals them as the performance of answerable questions that they often actually are. The prior question is who you actually are, not the person you present, not the character you have been performing, not the identity assembled from the social feedback of environments that had their own interests in who you became, but the actual thing, the entity that exists before the presentation and beneath the performance and after the social feedback has been stripped away 💭

This question is avoided not because it is unanswerable but because answering it honestly requires confronting a series of discoveries that comfortable life does not require confronting and that the performance of identity actively prevents. The discoveries include things like the fact that some of your stated values are not values you actually hold but values you have been performing because they produce the social response you need. The fact that some of your desires are not actually yours but were installed by the expectations of people whose approval you organized your life around. The fact that some of your certainties are maintained not because you are certain but because the uncertainty beneath them is too threatening to acknowledge. These discoveries are not comfortable but they are the beginning of actual self-knowledge, which is the beginning of the only freedom available to human beings, which is the freedom to choose who you are rather than to continue becoming who circumstances and other people's needs and your own fear have been making you.

THE LAYERS THAT MUST BE REMOVED 🎭

Self-knowledge is not found through reflection alone because the mind that is doing the reflecting is itself a product of the same processes that created the identity being examined, and it will protect those processes with the same motivated cognition that protects any identity-constituting belief. Self-knowledge emerges through the specific discomfort of behaving differently than your habitual pattern in situations that trigger the habitual pattern and paying close attention to what happens inside you when the behavior changes.

When you stop automatically agreeing and express your actual opinion and notice what arises: is it fear of disapproval, relief at authenticity, both simultaneously, the specific quality of the internal experience when you stop performing and start being tells you something about who has been performing and what the performance has been protecting. When you stop automatically accommodating and hold a boundary and notice what the holding produces: the specific texture of the anxiety or the relief or the grief or the unfamiliar solidity that emerges tells you something about what the accommodation has been doing for you and what holding it would cost.

THE PERSON UNDERNEATH 🌊

What most people find when they begin removing the layers is that the person underneath is more interesting, more particular, more capable of genuine connection, and more fundamentally okay than the performance suggested they would be if exposed. The performance is maintained by fear of exposure and the fear is that exposure would reveal inadequacy or unacceptability or something that cannot be loved. What actual exposure more often reveals is someone who has been trying very hard in conditions that did not always support the trying, who has been carrying things that were too heavy and continuing anyway, who has the specific form of dignity that belongs to a person who has survived their own particular life and arrived here, which is wherever here is, still capable of asking the question that makes all the other questions possible.

The question does not have a final answer because you are not finished. You are still happening. Who you are is still being determined by what you choose to do with the next hour and the hour after that, by who you decide to tell the truth to and who you decide to extend genuine care toward and what you decide is worth protecting and what you decide costs more than it provides. Identity is not a destination. It is a direction. And the only direction that produces something you can live with, at the end, is the direction of toward your actual self rather than away from the discovery of whoever that turns out to be 💛🔮✨