"What does it look like for you to be a self?"

By Philip Clark, Guest Contributor

Those words were spoken to me a few weeks into the horrific ordeal that was my
divorce. I was sitting in the living room of a family friend that had been helping me
process and cope with every miserable and painful step that I took after my wife of 10 years and mother to my three daughters woke up one morning and out of the blue told me that she didn’t want to be married to me anymore. Up was down, black was white and nothing made sense to me anymore. It turned out that everything I thought that had been true was a complete fabrication and I was left picking up the pieces of a broken home.

What I think this friend was telling me in that moment was that I had lost myself in that fabrication. I was so hell-bent on saving my marriage, on fixing our problems, that I had lost sight of who I was as an individual, as a self. I had become this reactionary figure that was rushing to put out one fire after another, trying to save something that had already ended.

I think I tried this hard because I had recognized that my role as a husband and a father had become my sole source of identity. I had sacrificed a higher degree, a potential career, hobbies, and more, all in the name of those two labels. I did the work to find some version of happiness and contentment in these sacrifices, despite the constant belittling abuse and manipulation. I had set aside everything I wanted, learned to keep my mouth shut, and above all, work to meet her needs instead of mine.

Suddenly, one of those two identities – a husband – was taken from me with the snap of her fingers. The other – a father – felt like it had been eviscerated and was about to become a hollow shell of what I had once envisioned. I had nothing left to define myself or sink myself into. I had no foundation on which I could build my identity and felt as if I was left treading water in the middle of the ocean.

So as I sat in my friend’s living room, hearing him ask me about my own self, I realized that I didn’t even know what it meant to be a “self”. I had hobbies, I had a job, I had a family, all things that I thought were required for an identity, but I still had that treading water feeling. The problem is that if you bury your own identity in the things you do or the people around you, you are left with nothing when they are lost, and that’s exactly where I had just found myself.

Those things: the things and people around us, are obviously all important to a self and to identity, but I think we tend to put entirely too much emphasis on them and use these things as a foundation of sand on which to build our selves.

Have you ever known someone for a long time, but when someone asks you to
describe them, you draw a complete blank? You’ve seen them do activities with you, gone out with them, maybe worked with them for years, but have no idea who they are as a person or how to even talk about who they are? I’d argue that these people are falling into that same pit. They are living a reactionary life, using things, people, or events around them to define themselves and are simply hiding behind them. When you ask about their life, you hear a series of endless stories and recaps, and never how they feel, what they want, or importantly, who they are.

Some of these things that we build our life around are noble pursuits. Whether its
fighting for your children to have better lives, furthering a career, being a devoted
husband, these are all great causes. But what happens when that fight is over or when there’s nothing left to fight for? What are you left with?

While in the process of writing this, I’ve been wracking my brain and using as many resources as I could think of to get a good, concise, if not oversimplified, definition of what a self is. I’ve spent a good amount of time here defining what a self isn’t without giving a definition of what it actually is. The problem is that I’ve had so much trouble coming up with this because the concept itself is so complex and oversimplifying it wouldn’t do it justice.

I think the best way to start talking about it is to relate it to the common event that
brought us into this community in the first place: our divorce. It is so easy to become stuck by it. The emotions it has brought up in us are so charged and intense that it feels like there is nothing else in the world that matters. It feels like every ounce of our effort needs to go into this mode of self-preservation so our kids and ourselves can just survive this thing.

The problem is that because those emotions are so big, it is so easy to get stuck in this fight mode, and it becomes our identity, or our entire sense of self. When is that fight over? And when that fight finally is over, what are you left with?

I think in this context, being a self is not getting stuck in that moment, and not letting the divorce entirely define who you are. It’s recognizing all of the ways you are still holding onto it and simply letting go. While it is a massively significant event that can contribute to who you are now, it shouldn’t be the entirety of who you are. Do you want to wake up and have your every thought consumed by the pain and trauma of what has happened? Or do you want to ask “what do I want today?” I think the latter perspective is getting closer to someone who knows and acts like a self.

It’s a constant journey, with no end point where anyone can say “yep, I’m a self!” Rather, it’s a prolonged effort, figuring out the things we want to hold onto and the things we want to let go of; how we want to respond to the world and events around us. It’s not getting stuck in a moment that you can’t get out of but being willing to grow and adapt as life changes. Someone that’s a self can thrive when the rug is pulled out from under them, and everything feels like it’s been taken away – because they aren’t using those things to define their self. It still hurts, sure, but thriving still feels possible, because they know themselves well enough to say that they ultimately don’t need those things to thrive.

Since it’s a never-ending journey, I’ll end with the same question that’s been tacked on my wall along with my other inspirational quotes (I call it my teenage girl wall). I’ve been asking myself this question endlessly since I first heard it almost a year ago now, and I challenge whoever read this far to do the same:

“What does it look like for you to be a self?”