Life is like a stony road we lay down as we walk. With every step and every decision, we place another stone, gradually shaping our path. When we turn around and look back, it may seem as though the road was always there-but in truth, we built it ourselves.
The stones beneath our feet exist not before us, but because we walk-formed by every small decision, every fracture, every moment of letting go. As we move forward, we are not just following a path-we are weaving ourselves into it.
We take shape with every step on that path. Still, we believe that at the end, we will discover our true selves-our essence. But if the end of the road leads back to us, have we ever wondered: who was it that laid down and walked this path all along?
When we say “I want to find myself”, we often set out to search for an essence hidden within us and try to experience life through trial and error to find that essence.
Perhaps we feel that if we can go deep enough within ourselves, if we can scrape ourselves enough, we will surely find something fixed somewhere and always there.
At different moments of life, when our wishes and preferences become opposite to each other, we think that we have lost our essence.
Like reaching for a precious metal, our inner hands are constantly reaching for what we believe to be our essence-as if, if we find it, we will find our place in life. However, making sense of the self as an unchanging entity also leads us to a kind of inner dead end.
If living is a path that we weave by constantly choosing new stones; and if we change a little more with each new stone we place—then how can our essence always remain the same?
Sometimes when we look at photo albums or reminisce with old friends, we have the opportunity to see how much we have changed. This change, of course, does not only involve our physical appearance; on the contrary, perhaps things we did or said back then, thoughts we had, make no sense to us now. Sometimes we wonder how we could have achieved certain things so long ago; “Was it me?” we ask ourselves. At other times we blush with embarrassing memories and say, “If I had the mind I have now, I would never have done that.”
Just as our thought map of a few years ago does not fit us properly when we look back at it now, when we look at it from our thought map a few years later, our current self may seem narrow or loose, small or big.
Perhaps it is precisely at such moments that we feel lost.
We stop and think, “I used to think like this, but now… everything has changed so much, I don’t want it to be like this anymore. If I do the opposite of what I have been thinking all this time, would I be betraying myself?” We assume that we have lost the radiance of our essence.
However, humanistic approaches in psychology tell us that our identity is not a fixed essence waiting to be discovered somewhere; on the contrary, it is a structure that is constantly changing, developing and transforming with the crises and important moments in our lives.
Our self is shaped as we weave the stones we choose for our path; our self continues to develop along that path and is never complete as long as we exist.
For this reason, our self and the essence that we think is hidden in the deepest depths is not fixed-in fact, it is a dynamic structure.
“L’existence précède l’essence.” (Existence precedes essence) says Sartre (1946/2007); in other words, he explains that human beings first exist and then decide what they will be.
Human beings are not born with a definition; they create who and what they are and what they will be, their essence-like the path from raw clay to a beautiful sculpture-with their own hands in this process. For this reason, our true self or what we call our “essence” can perhaps never be found; it can only be constructed. And this construction, even if we are not aware of it, starts by itself with the choices we make in our lives and continues silently.
So, if the self is not a fixed thing that we can extract from our depths, why do some things always feel as if they belong to us and we belong to that thing?
Bourdieu’s (1990) concept of “Habitus” actually explains this situation very well: It describes how the individual adopts the patterns he/she sees and learns in the environment he/she grows up in since childhood-for example, in his/her family and/or culture—and how he/she automatises these patterns over time.
When this way of understanding and feeling becomes internalised over time, the individual starts to exhibit these attitudes without thinking; at some point, he/she may even think that these are his/her essence.
However, although we perceive the habits we have internalised as our essence, they are actually just a set of structures that are familiar-and therefore feel safe. For this reason, the familiar can sometimes feel like “mine”.
When we consider all this, it is insufficient to say that the self is an essence that always exists within us in the same way, a truth that is sought only on the outside, or familiar and comfortable habits. Because sometimes we may not see anything when we look inside, sometimes we may not find a part of ourselves outside-or sometimes what is familiar to us may not really belong to us. Everything we internalise may not always come from within.
One may not innately know or feel who one is, but one can gradually construct who one will be at every step and in every choice. If he does not like what he has built, instead of demolishing it, he can place a new piece, a new trial on that piece.
And in this way, what they like, what they don’t like, what they want to be and what they don’t want to be are formed.
This is a very good moment to return to the metaphor we mentioned at the beginning of the article.
We had likened life to a stone road that we built-a road that is paved as we walk, a road that is not fixed, a road that can be returned to, but never given from the beginning…
As we walk on this road and weave our way as we walk, we are not only weaving our life, but also our self and essence with our decisions and feelings.
Some of the stones we leave behind, some we pick up again, and some we find in places we never knew or could not even guess.
But each time, a little more carefully, a little more of ourselves, we continue to walk and make sense of it.
Because perhaps it is not only a matter of finding who we are or our essence, but also of never giving up on building who we are stone by stone-and staying on that path; and perhaps because we feel this in our deepest depths, we somehow continue to stay there by transforming without stopping.
References
Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice (R. Nice, Trans.). Stanford University Press.
Sartre, J.-P. (2007). Existentialism is a humanism (C. Macomber, Trans.). Yale University Press. (Original work published 1946)