Fernando Pessoa on Unselfing into Who You Really Are

Essay / long-form · The Marginalian

This essay directly confronts the paradox that most self-help advice ignores: the "self" you're trying to be authentic to doesn't actually exist as a fixed thing, making Pessoa's philosophical approach more useful than typical authenticity rhetoric. If you've felt frustrated by generic "just be yourself" advice, this explores what that actually means when you're constantly changing and contradictory.

“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight,” E. E. Cummings wrote in his timeless summons for the courage to be yourself. But what does it really mean to be oneself when the self is an ever-moving target of ever-changing sentiments and cells, a figment of fixity to dam the fluidity that carries us along the river of life, to soften the hard fact that we never fully know who we are because we are… read article

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