Your self is not your self in the same way your gallbladder is your gallbladder. If you said “I’m scared of failure” and someone replied “where are you scared of failure?” you would look at this person as a lunatic. What do you mean “where?” In spite of this, we often fall into the trap of storytelling. We tell ourselves “I am not the type of person who takes career risks” or “I am impulsive and prone to anger.” Where, specifically, do you find these parts in yourself? What if I told you that your self is a totally fluid thing, more based on your inner monologue than anything you’d find in the prefrontal cortex?
In most ways and on most days, we use these narratives about our “true selves” to make sense of an increasingly chaotic world always tilting in favor of entropy. But we’ve become too firm in our characterizations that the self cannot change. We have inadvertently calcified ourselves, and limited our own ability to make choices. We’ve told ourselves a story about ourselves so many times that we’ve actually calcified our ability to change. How to break this?
In meditation, you learn to think of your thoughts as waves and consciousness as the ocean. This is much easier said and understood on a cushion than it is when someone is inviting you to have another glass of wine when you really should be on your way home. You don’t sit at the bar and think “I want to have another glass, but really, this is just a wave of a thought on the ocean of consciousness.” That would be…unworkable. But, if you can take a step back on some days, a genuine step back and wonder “Is there any actual reason why I cannot go to this party other than me constantly telling myself I’m a socially awkward person?” you’ll find that the answer is likely no. And it doesn’t quite follow that you’re going to go to this party and you’ll magically be cured of awkwardness; you’re likely to still be awkward. The point is chiseling the rock down, bit by bit. The point is showing up. This point is taking minute actions, day after day, that unbeknownst to you, slowly compound and allow you to break self-reinforced incorrect ideas about yourself. You’re not ramming the thing head on, you’re taking a detour around the bend to get to where you need to go.
We’re formed by millions of memories and of these memories and perceptions we “make” a version of Danny, or Linda or Gus, or whomever and we say, inside our minds “this is how a Danny that experienced these things would act” but there’s no one really in there. They’re just thoughts that then tell us to do these things. They-we-are pliable. Ever expanding. Ever learning. Ever changing. We are oceans.