Upon my recent break-up… albeit as recently as May, which may not be too recent for some but is still quite recent for me… I’d begun to look at ways to mend my broken heart. One phrase that consistently appears is that “one must focus on oneself during this time.” I’ve pondered this dilemma throughout my time of loss and on occasion obsessed over the true meaning behind the phrase. There have been times where I simply laid in bed the entire day dwelling on what I had lost and how to better myself for the future… constantly repeating the aforementioned phrase in the hope of sparking some sort of epiphany into myself. This of course never really happened until I began working on a free writing journal (without censorship) last night. I had no clue what would come out of it, if anything at all; yet the practice of doing so intrigued me enough to experiment… call it the empiricist in me.
I’ve been quite taken back by what I’ve found… a lack of a sense of self, self-worth, of truly knowing who I as an individual really am. It seems that I, at the ripe young age of 30, am experiencing some sort of existentialist crisis. I’ve commonly defined myself as being an
“I”
One of my digital manipulations.
individual, the reality of it all being that I actually define myself through other’s perceptions of me… for those of you familiar with this ideology it’s essentially a derivative of Charles H. Cooley’s “Looking Glass Self Theory.” Without someone there to chameleonize myself for, I feel that I have no redeeming qualities for existence. No one to garner a smile and great compliment from, no one to help me define my identity, no one at all… now I must look to the only individual around to identify with, myself.
Who is this man in the mirror I wonder? What does he really enjoy? What does he really want? What does he really fear, need, feel?
The ideas seem to pervade my consciousness and in my existentialist rhetoric I’ve come to the conclusion that I still don’t know… i.e. my crisis. Sure, I’ve accomplished a lot in life… but the one thing that I’ve never mastered is me. I’ve always distracted myself from truly getting to know me as an individual… my “I,” if you will; hence the “I” in “I”dentity. I think myself to be an intellectual, a philosophical eclectic that picks and chooses a philosophy to suit my own needs at the time… a rationalist, a realist, a romantic, a (as pointed out previously) empiricist… only to find that I’m in a dualistic (dualism) state of wrestling between the ideas of logic and emotion with one overcoming the other at certain times.
Who am I really? Will there ever be an answer to this question or is there no real truth in who any of us are?
The key to solving these questions must be addressed through experience, exploration, and experimentation. The answers only come to the surface through the individual and are as unique as the individual themselves. No, I’ll not stop my search… the long road of life will never allow me to do so, but I vow to pursue the depths of my “I”dentity to whatever extent that I must… because the only thing that I have left is me, and my vow to better myself.
J. Michael Jeffries Blogs 