It’s both a strength and a weakness, to look inside oneself and continually tinker with what is found inside. That is because we will never find satiation with whatever configuration we end up on, just a slow and arduous process of trying to make myself more resilient, more efficient, and generally better as a result of continually opening myself to self-improvement and critique, at times though feeling like I need to scrap the whole thing.
It brings up to a couple issues though, continuing to be malleable does lend itself to being able to adapt and change based on my needs for the moment and knowledge I’ve managed to ascertain, still, it doesn’t allow for a strict continuity of self. This leads to problems of identity down the line as I have a hard time knowing who I am, and what exactly makes me… me.
It’s a great question which can’t be answered simply.
As a psychologist, I have to concede these external factors that we constantly contend with will continually contour who we are to ultimately are. There is a sense of automaticity to it, an unknown force that will pull strings to move our arms and legs, leaving us only to make sense of what we’ve done only after we have done it. We defend it so harshly only to come to find no rhyme or reason for our actions or why we spent so much time defending it so fervently.
I found myself here, looking back at my actions, my words as I was dead tired listening to someone else speak. It was the culmination of many conversations that I have had part of in preceding months that surfaced finally in my brain. Moments before I could not tell you what that person was talking about, but everything began to resonate as the words they spoke on a topic I was only half interested became the most engrossing thing in the world. Not for what they were saying but simply because, for that moment, I had a realization about myself, my action, and my history.
I have too many of these moments, which downplays the vibrant and special nature of them. My whole life had come into crystal clear clarity, and moments in memory were highlighting like beaconing these behaviors that I have been doing my whole life. It’s when I finally can see through the fog and smoke that I understand a new perspective, get away from myself for a moment, and look critically at my actions. It’s taking in that new perspective and see myself and the world from a different place. It feels like expanding.
It’s about choice at the end of the day, to be able to choose which parts of myself to keep and which ones to tinker away. Finding the bright parts of my parents, my friends, and my role models within myself, and taking those unsavory bits and tinker them away into something so much better. I am not perfect but I continue to be better and that quality that makes me, me. The eternal striving.
It’s a pursuit of greater space that I find also the answer to this continuity question with the ever-changing self. I do not matter where their piece of me comes, only that I make them my own as I have them. To move away from the autocorrection in my nature to something much more deliberate in craft and character. To build myself so when the machine runs, it runs smoothly and in the right way. It’s wanting to move away from allowing things to happen and making them happen. To cut the strings and move on my own, even if automatically, to know it was a choice.
That what it comes down to, that my autocorrect is at least speaking the same language as me, so when I do find fault I know it’s me and not someone else.
Too Human 