@zita

“What I am – is changing in any given moment – very true, but don’t you think that sometimes having a fluid sense of self can also create conflict / crisis ? For me it creates confusion. For example – am I suppose to be strong in a given moment of pain or should I allow myself to break down and let it out of my system ? If I develop a pattern of breaking down each time ( since I allowed myself to ) then will I ever know what it is to be strong ? It’s hard to separate thoughts of what I am suppose to be and what I am .”

I don’t think that you are changing constantly, but the circumstances change and you do grow and learn all the time. I think that the whole point of being fluid (or authentic) is to not create patterns or respond to things with “should” and “supposed to”.

I do think that everyone would benefit greatly from developing some skills like being patient. To not react to things without any thought, but to respond only after a moment of reflection. You can still respond to things with authenticity from your unique point of view. You’d just be doing it in a more mature way. It would be the mature version of yourself.

I’ll ask you to think of this: who is asking you to define yourself and for what purpose? We strive to define our whole being in a few keywords, but why? It is one thing to list skills in a job interview, but to describe yourself as a person is kind of pointless.

A person says that they are “confident, independent and kind”. They know it, and we know it, that they’re not those things 100% of the time. Some people aren’t those things most of the time, and they still describe themselves as such. For what purpose? So that we could treat them with prejudice instead of allowing them to show their true colours? It makes no sense when you really think about it.

Even in dating ads, one should rather describe how they feel about things rather than saying who they think they are. Because in all honesty, a person who makes a big deal about being a kind person often is everything but. Probably because they believe that they are kind, so they have become blind to their own unkind actions. Cognitive dissonance: when you really believe something, you’re unable to process conflicting information and disregard it instead. Or, run into an identity crisis. Or believe your whole life that you are something bad, which you’re actually not, and that is a tragedy.

But I digress. I guess you responded to the question of “why” in your story about the children. Having a definition of yourself makes you feel more safe, because then you have this clear place and identity in this life, and a readymade pattern of how you’ll behave in the future. You create your own destiny for yourself, which feels safer than allowing life and who you are to unfold naturally. Unfortunately life isn’t going to be any safer, life will still unfold itself all the time, but you might miss out on some of the things that are unfolded in you. You can’t see them, because you are looking at yourself through a definition you’ve created for yourself.