When I was boy — in the very throes of becoming a human — my young companions and I constantly encountered the admonishment to “be yourself.” Frail memory suggests it started with Sesame Street and Marlo Thomas’ “Free to Be, You and Me.” Expressive individuality was the Pole Star of childhood development.
The problem for us was that modernity had emptied out any understanding of who or what that self was, such that we interpreted the admonishment as a call to cultivate, or to curate, a presentation of “a self” we wished to be. What we then created was neither unique, since we bought it off the rack, nor a self, properly speaking. It was a personality.
You cannot be yourself as long as you fail to understand what the self is. Even that, as e.e. cummings reminds us, is no guarantee that you’ll be able to be yourself. Or express yourself.
Think of the question children are always asked: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Think of the first question those children, once grown, are asked upon meeting someone new: “What do you do?” Implicit in those two questions is the problem of our present moment.
Last updated on June 24, 2024
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