‘Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation.

Alice replied, rather shyly, ‘I — I hardly know, sir, just at present — at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then

– Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll

Iwas the person that would passively pass through life. I breezed through the motions with autopilot on. I was a passenger just passing through, unable to see through the haze of familiar pain. It gave me a prescriptive identity that outlined how I was to view the world and myself. Fast-forward a couple of years, in the midst of a psychological crisis, I decided to embark on a journey toward personal discovery. I set out to establish a purpose, to be concise and tell the truth as best I could. This quest involved seeking the answer to one of life’s most fundamental questions of human existence: who am I and how do I begin finding the answer to this question?

I thought the clues were to be found in the person that I used to be. So I began gathering the remnants of a deeply fragmented past. I exhumed aspects of a life once lived and examined each piece carefully for a thread to connect the past to the present. I desperately wished to afford my life some semblance of unity and purpose. But the deeper I searched, the more lost I felt. I no longer recognized the person I once knew, she was frigidly unresponsive, beneath heavy layers of accumulative traumas. I no longer recognized the person that I once was but this didn’t mean that I was lost. I had shed the layers of an identity that served its purpose at the time but was no longer useful to my present way of being in the world. Throughout the process of self-discovery, I learned that I could never truly lose myself because the self is anything but constant and static, a moment in time. Finding myself involves a perpetual phoenix-like state of re-capitulation. I found myself by realizing that I was never lost, to begin with.

Catalyze an identity

“Start with yourself. Take care of yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your Being.”

— Dr Jordan B Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

A suggested exercise: I began by asking myself what qualities I admire in a human being? This outlined an ideal to aspire toward and a counter-ideal to steer clear of. 

Dr Jordan B Peterson proposed an idea that I prioritized as of utmost importance. I decided who it is that I want to be and then aimed, single-mindedly at that ideal. This was done on my own terms, I was sure to choose an ideal that fulfils the role of what an ideal looks like to me. I thought in terms of: setting things up as I need them to be and being the person I needed to be, then imagined what that would look like. In seriously contemplating the answers to these questions, I continually created a new ideal to aspire toward. And once the ideal slowly began to crystallize, it was time for me to burn off the deadwood.

2. Burn off the deadwood:

“The truth is something that burns. It burns off dead wood.And people don’t like having the dead wood burnt off often because they’re 95 percent dead wood. Burning dead wood means shedding all the elements of you that are no longer worthy of the pursuits that you value. As you do that, you shape yourself evermore precisely into something that can withstand the tragedy of life and act as a beacon to the world. So let the death of what is insufficient about you occur and then wait for your rebirth”

— Jordan B Peterson.

Again, this step is characteristically nested within an additional set of questions. Burning dead wood necessitated asking myself: what should I carry forward with me in time and what I should let go of? What is no longer aligned with the pursuits that I find valuable? I remained cognizant of the fact that the more deadwood I burned off, voluntarily, the less it gathered around me, the easier it was to move forward in time.

3. Improve the quality of your actions

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

— Will Durant

This is no trivial matter. My aim was to develop great habits through small tiny actions (micro-routines). In doing so, I hoped to maximize the quality of my life in such a way that would be of benefit to myself, my friends, family and the community.

Suggested exercise: I asked myself if I could set my life up in a manner that would make me pleased to exist then what would this look like? I then documented this by designing a week worth of days that I would really like to have. This involved ruthlessly scouring every aspect of my life: mental well-being, diet, sleep cycles, relationships, career, exercise. I would NOT include an experience unless I found it to bring productivity, joy and meaning to my life.

3. Examine your fears

That which I most need is always to be found where I least wish to look. Absolutely everything I need to find is embedded in everything that I am afraid of. This step was about uncovering that which I feared in order to recover and re-integrate these repressed elements of the self into the remainder of my personality. This involved a conscious effort not to divert my path out of fear. Expressed more clearly, if I am on a path and something emerges that frightens me and would compromise the journey forward, then I shouldn’t avoid it. The key was to break my fear — past, present and future down into manageable, smaller chunks. I devised a strategy of approach and hopefully one day in the future, mastery.

Suggested exercise: I examined my fears, deeply and deliberately. I asked myself honestly: what am I afraid of? what am I avoiding? what am I failing to develop?

I can say wholeheartedly that these steps have been invaluable on my journey toward finding the answers to life’s most fundamental questions of human existence. They’ve been a source of comfort and repose, a point on the map when I was feeling wayward and lost. My wish for you is that they become yours, too.

The self is an assemblage of colourfully ephemeral experiences. The only thing we can do is live through the changes as truthfully as we can.