Where to find this idea:
It’s On Me: Accept Hard Truths, Discover Your Self, and Change Your Life by Sara Kuburic
Pause for a second. Whether you are in your bed, in your kitchen, or at your desk, just pause and think about this: who am I at this very moment?
While we use the word “self” in everyday conversations — self-improvement, self-love, self-care — it seems that we often neglect the “self” part. And although understanding who we are is our innate need, it feels that we search for the “self” only when we face challenges and uncertainty.
To kick off the journey of understanding the self, let’s take a look at how 2 schools of philosophy — essentialism and existentialism — see it.
Essentialists believe that everyone has an essence that has been given to them, and in order to understand the self, we need to find the essence that’s already there. This essence is basically a set of characteristics that make us who we are. We were born to be a certain thing and we can succeed or fail at doing so.
On the other hand, existentialism believes the self is something that is to be created, not something that is given to us. There is no predetermined essence. We determine who we are by the way we choose to live. Our sense of self is created by having freedom to make choices, making those choices and taking responsibility for them.
Which brings us to an important point — the only way to find who you are is through your actions. Our understanding of who we are (beliefs, traditions, values, etc.) informs our actions, and our actions inform how we see ourselves. We learn about the self by experiencing things and engaging with the world. That’s what makes us “us.”
This also means understanding the self as something that has 2 parts — necessity and possibility. Necessity includes characteristics we are born with and that we can’t really change like our need to eat or our parents. But there is also the “possibility” part of the self — who we can become. The self is at the intersection of necessity and possibility. It’s everything that has happened and everything that will happen to us. Every moment that we breathe, we are becoming ourselves.