CRITIQUE OF SELF

by Robert Healy

When we arrive where we are meant to be it always feels awkward; unexpected; false.

I spent the last six years of my life seeking solace and realized I lost my soul in the process. Funny how that happens. Funny how the world leaves us to our whims and when we think we're doing well it drops us in the sink to drain us of our hopes and drown out our dreams.

What makes me think I've done anything though, really?

All I see are accents. All I see are attempts. Where? When?

All these people trying to fit in.

All I see are attempts at unconventionality.

When everyone is attempting to be unconventional, what becomes of it? New conventions, of course. Subcultures rise and lose their status among the underground. These are the tectonic plates of our society. This is how people fit in.

They assume the identity of what they believe does not belong. They assume it alongside millions of others.

In these areas intended for misfits all I see are people fitting in—how ironic. This leads me to believe that the only way to truly stand out is to try your best to fit right in—to be absolutely conventional in every way.

How can you stand out in a world designed to accomodate everyone? It leaves me baffled. It leaves me shy.

Do you know who you are?

How did you find out?

The trick to finding out who you are is to test yourself. To try and hide from what you think you are.

The truth hides in opposites.

I'm confused, though. If I am the opposite of how I act, if I am the opposite of everything I believe about myself, how can I be true?

Where is the truth if lies lead the way?

And when does it stop? I mean, once you've confronted your truths as lies and embraced your lies as truths, is that the end? Is the self solved for good?

No, of course not—you are a result of your inputs; the weather may change the way you greet someone, their shirt may determine the duration of your conversation, the quality of your sleep on any given night will affect your attitude, which changes your day, which may change the way you sleep the following night.

There is an uncountable amount of inputs you process everyday that change every aspect of who you are. So you can see, the truth is not stationary; these ideas are not even two dimensional. You could not say that a single aspect of who you are lies somewhere on a line between truth and lie. No, no, no—these things do not work that way; this is not theory.

The map of your soul is not flat, it is as full as the world around you.¹ If we return to "inputs" and label them "experiences," we can say that we are a result of our experiences. "We are our choices," Sartre said. Concise.

Some may argue that purpose and meaning must be assigned, that experiences do not inherently carry value. We make choices based on the experiences we encounter and assign value to them based on the outcome; building up a database of right and wrong, a value-based decision tree that leads to virtue, or wherever we wish to be led. That we are a result of our choices, and we have the ability to choose; therefore we have control over our experiences.

I won't argue that we have control over certain experiences. And I will say that we must choose wisely when we truly do have a choice. However, my argument is directed at the construction of self, not its outputs. My argument against a value-based system is that it's completely fake. Because, ultimately, I'm the one assigning values, and who am I but the values I assign to myself?

Do you see the inherent falsehood I'm presenting? What I'm saying is that the entire world is built on theory and we've mistaken reality as proof of concept. What I'm saying is that reality (on a societal level), if viewed as a road, could just as easily be taking us somewhere completely different; but we've chosen to devote ourselves to this way of being because we have no experience with the alternative. What I'm stumbling around is what Fernando Pessoa put brilliantly, that "what we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to make life more livable."

What I'm saying, really, is that all we are is animals, and we've formed myths and signs and symbols to prove to ourselves that we're something more—and it seems to have worked to some extent.

What I'm saying is that I could rearrange my entire personality or I could be a billionaire or I could commit to the propagation of evil and it may make zero difference. What I'm saying is that one day I will die and the conscience I've developed as a result of the stories I've been told—stories intended to make me a member of society—will die and nothing more will come of it; I will be forgotten like old roses or dusty photographs.

What I'm saying is that we are slaves to the gods, whether they exist or not. What I'm saying is that the existence of a god and the existence of an afterlife are independent issues and the truth or falsehood of one does not determine the truth or falsehood of the other.

So, how to approach the self?

You must make your entire existence an act of rebellion, this is Camus' claim, and I tend to agree. What fun is it to play by someone else's rules when the game ends the same either way?

NOTE

1. One could say, even, that it is the world around you. That the world is a mirror and you are a window. Do we project our unconscious thoughts and feelings onto ambiguous stimuli? This is what Rorschach posited with his famous inkblot tests. That the way we view the world around us reveals aspects of our personality, emotional functioning, and underlying conflicts. This leads us to an understanding of the world as both projective and subjective—and far, far away from the idea that our experience is strictly objective.↩

NOTE ON THE ABSENCE OF GENDER CRITIQUE

In the context of this essay, I have focused primarily on the existential and philosophical aspects of self-construction, omitting an in-depth exploration of the role of gender in shaping individual identities. As Simone de Beauvoir (1949) notes in "The Second Sex," the social construction of gender profoundly influences how we understand ourselves and our place in the world, challenging the notion that self is solely a product of experience.

Judith Butler, in her seminal work "Gender Trouble" (1990), further complicates this understanding by arguing that gender itself is performative, meaning that it is not an inherent identity but rather a series of acts and behaviors that are socially regulated and reiterated over time. Butler's theory underscores the idea that the self is not a fixed entity but is continuously constructed through the performance of gender roles within a specific cultural context.

By not including the aspect of gender in my critique, I acknowledge that I have overlooked a critical dimension of identity formation. The insights of de Beauvoir, Butler, and other gender theorists such as bell hooks and Adrienne Rich remind us that gender is a fundamental axis along which power, identity, and social norms are negotiated. Future explorations of self-critique must consider these dimensions to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the complexities of identity.