Self?

One of my earliest experiments with art involved questioning the perception of self from varied lenses. It was largely inspired by my undergraduate lectures on Lacan and his psychoanalytic idea of the Self. With life expectancy rates increasing, it’s a curious case that we don’t make the self, front and centre of our universe, not just early on but repeatedly, at different junctures. Especially because so much of our sense of self leaks into different aspects of our lives, shaping and reshaping the consequences of our hazy decision-making matrices.

In the larger scheme of things, our lives are worth a centimetre when scaled against cosmic distance at best. But to each of us, life is nothing short of building our own definition of the centre of the universe, finding and becoming our own sun. When George Herbert Mead talks about the self, he frames it not as something innate, but as something that emerges through interaction: the “I” responding to the “Me,” the individual negotiating with society’s expectations. The self, in his view, is not discovered in isolation but formed in dialogue.

That idea stayed with me, because it suggests that the self is never finished. It is iterative. Relational. Vulnerable to context. Incomplete without an external anchor.

Lacan, on the other hand, complicates this further. His mirror stage proposes that our first encounter with the self is fundamentally a misrecognition, an image we identify with before we understand ourselves. From that moment on, we are forever chasing coherence, trying to live up to an image that was never fully ours to begin with; rather, a reflection that exists at the mercy of a specific combination of light and reflective surface.

Perhaps that’s why so much of adulthood feels like an exercise in reconciliation: between who we think we are, who we are seen as, and who we quietly fear we might be.

And what the practicalities of life don’t prepare you for is the fatigue of carrying multiple selves across time. The version of you that made sense at 22 (hello, the version of me who thought “it feels right” was the litmus test!) becomes unrecognizable at 28. Beliefs once worn like armour start to feel like ill-fitting costumes, begin to come in the way of daily existenc, constantly triggering endless spirals of ‘who am I, really?’. And yet, we are strangely resistant to revisiting the question of self, as if doing so would invalidate the lives we’ve already lived, and as if everytime something is put under the lens, it loses its ‘realness’.

But maybe questioning the self is not an act of erasure. Maybe it’s an act of maintenance, an act of grounding yourself from time to time, a pit stop to catch a breather.

If the self is relational, then it must be recalibrated as relationships change, as one expands their purview to allow for the widening of the reflective surface, so more of it can be captured, questioned, and hollered back. If it is constructed, then it deserves redesign when the blueprint no longer holds, a zoomed-out viewing to ensure the towers are leaning, but only by design. To not question the self is to assume permanence where none was promised, or rather, none was sought.

I no longer believe the self is something to be “found.” It is something to be held lightly, examined often, and allowed to contradict itself. Perhaps the goal is not to arrive at a final, stable definition, but to remain fluent in revision, to keep choosing our sun, even as the universe expands around us.

And maybe that, in itself, is an active choice of being.