Changing, growing, and working on yourself I consider really important. Not just accepting everything as it is but thinking about how you want your life and yourself to be and creating this life and this person.
But is there a limit to how much is too much? Because always working on yourself takes a lot of effort, self-awareness, and time and maybe by always working on yourself, trying to be the perfect person, at some point keeps you from actually living and enjoying your life. So where is the boundary between creating the ideal you and just accepting certain character traits and habits and living with them as part of you and who you are?
Because aren’t our flaws the ones that actually make us who we are, make us individual and special?
But who are we anyway? Are we our thoughts, are we our actions, are we the things we say, are we our past, our future…?
Our past is our past. It shows the decisions that have been made by our past self. It reflects the experiences and choices that ultimately made us to whom we are now; why and how we became the person we are.
Our future is only hypothetical. Our dreams and desires express our goals, our idea of our perfect life. They reveal what kind of life we want to live and what kind of person we want to be.
So our true self must lie in the present. Who we really are, the entity we consider “me” or “I”, must therefore be found somewhere in the current present.
Some people say what happens in our thoughts represents the person we are; what we think is the expression of whom we are. But aren’t our actions ultimately the result of our thoughts and therefore the representation of ourselves? Because who else knows the times when you have an inner conversation with yourself; discussing a thought or an idea; weighing possibilities; exploring alternatives; deciding on an opinion and a way to react in a certain situation;….
Weird thoughts pop up in my head all the time, but I have the power to overthink them and decide not to act based on these thoughts. I mean, there are situations where I am so happy or so angry that I want to scream, cry or punch something, but through this filter formed by the norms of our society (maybe telling me, that it’ll inappropriate or socially not approved) I decide how to act in a particular situation. So what we do and say always goes through this filter.
The problem now is to distinguish between the filter only created by society, telling you what and what not to do and say, and the filter that is produced by yourself, overthinking a particular thought and deciding whether it represents what you really think and feel or if it’s just a weird thought that accidentally entered your mind.
You yourself can eventually decide how you act and what you say. So you can make up your mind about what kind of person you want to portray to the outside world. By acting a particular way or saying specific things you can create a certain image of yourself. You have the power to invent the person you appear to be for the rest of the world. And isn’t that also not really you but only an invented fictional character you play?
So who are we, really?