How Do I Find My Self?
To ask “How do I find my self?” we must first confront a more unsettling question: what do we mean by “self” at all?
This is not a trivial preliminary—it is the core difficulty. Defining anything that we ourselves inhabit is notoriously elusive. Yet this struggle to define has its own value: it forces us into multiplicity, into perspective, into humility.
Let us begin simply.
Is my self what I feel?
If so, it is in constant flux. Feelings rise and dissolve like weather systems. There is a happy self, a grieving self, an anxious self, an angry self—each vivid, each convincing, each temporary. If self equals feeling, then identity has no continuity; it is a succession of moods mistakenly mistaken for essence.
Is my self what I think?
Then it becomes the machinery of cognition: perception, memory, imagination, language. The self would be the narrator assembling symbols into meaning—the thinker behind thoughts. Yet thoughts contradict one another. They change with information, fatigue, desire. Sartre would remind us here that consciousness is not a thing but an activity—a nothingness that perpetually negates what it was a moment ago. If I am my thoughts, then I am never complete, never settled.
Is my self what I experience?
Then identity becomes the sum of encounters—pleasant and unpleasant, nourishing and toxic, hopeful and despondent. But experiences happen to us. They pass through us. Kafka’s characters suffer precisely because they are reduced to the conditions imposed upon them—trial, judgment, bureaucracy—without ever locating a stable “I” behind the ordeal. If self equals experience, then we are hostages to circumstance.
Is my self my body?
Then it is tall or short, young or aging, healthy or sick, beautiful or disfigured. But the body changes relentlessly. Hindu philosophy, particularly Vedanta, treats this identification as a fundamental error: the body is prakriti—nature—while the self (atman) is something else entirely. To mistake the body for the self is to confuse the costume for the actor.
Or is my self how others see me?
Then identity becomes relational, a reflection in other minds. Sartre called this the Look: the moment when I become an object in another’s gaze. My self fractures into versions—professional self, parental self, lover self, stranger self. Which one is real? All of them? None?
This leads us to a more destabilizing possibility: what if the self is not internal at all?
What if it emerges between us and the world?
Rather than a solid core—like the pit of a cherry—perhaps the self is more like a field, a halo, a zone of convergence where people, objects, trees, animals, memories, and meanings meet. In Hindu thought, this resembles the idea that the individual self is not separate from the totality (Brahman), but a localized appearance within it. The self is not contained—it is distributed.
No wonder this question feels destabilizing.
The shock resembles what Christendom experienced when Galileo displaced Earth from the center of the cosmos. Humanity survived that wound, but not without anxiety. Likewise, the idea that there is no single, unchanging self threatens our psychological comfort. We want a center. We want coherence. We want a permanent “me.”
Yet many psychoanalytic thinkers suggest the opposite: mental health does not lie in rigid cohesion, but in the capacity to tolerate multiplicity. To live through situational selves without demanding that they collapse into a single narrative. Continuity, they argue, may be an illusion we impose retroactively.
Camus would see this as the human condition confronting the absurd: our longing for unity meeting a world that offers none. The mistake is not the absence of meaning, but our refusal to accept that absence without despair. Kafka’s protagonists suffer because they search endlessly for a definitive explanation—for the law, the verdict, the core identity—that never arrives.
Seen this way, Jim Carrey’s Me, Myself and Irene may not merely depict pathology. It may exaggerate a universal truth: we are already plural. Not schizophrenic, but fractured. Not broken, but unresolved.
So how do we “find” the self?
Perhaps we don’t.
Perhaps the self is not something to be discovered like a buried artifact, but something to be lived, negotiated, and endured. Sartre would say we are condemned to freedom—not because we lack a self, but because we must continually create one without guarantees.
And Hindu philosophy would add a final paradox: the moment we stop trying to define the self, we may glimpse it—not as an object, but as awareness itself.
In that sense, the search for the self ends not in certainty, but in tolerance:
tolerance for change, contradiction, and incompleteness.
And perhaps that, rather than cohesion, is what it means to be whole.
The quest for knowing our self is worthwhile and heroic if we are willing to risk our convictions and the security of feeling solid!
If you would like more resources on “self”and locating one’s self, leave a comment below and I can direct you to some interesting resources.
