Where does the self come from

An attempt to understand where what I call "me" comes from, written between crises, readings, and the silence left when certainties fade away.

Over the years, I started to find the very rhythm of life strange: waking up, repeating the same patterns, an automatic choreography. In the gap between one task and another, the question that won't leave me alone arrived: why?

That's when I stumbled upon Camus's absurd. The idea that life doesn't come with a pre-installed meaning hit hard: first as sadness, then as freedom. The absurd is born from the encounter between our desire for meaning and the indifferent silence of the universe. If there's no predetermined meaning, we're the ones who invent it. But then came the other question: who is this "we"?

I tried to observe my own "self" like someone trying to find the source of a leak, or to put it more in my daily terms, trying to debug an unexpected new behavior (feature or bug?). The way I speak reminds me of a childhood friend. Some habits seem like unconscious copies of my parents. My opinions, when I dig them up, have roots in books, in conversations, in people who passed through my life so quickly they might not even remember my name.

My individuality is, in truth, a mosaic. A patchwork of voices, gestures, traits, tastes, irritations, and dreams that weren't born with me. I'm made of influences I absorbed without asking permission, that shaped me without my noticing. And here lies the paradox: I want to be myself, but my "myself" seems to have been written by a bunch of people who didn't even know they were writing.

Maybe I'm just rediscovering a very Freudian idea: the world out there influenced me and stayed in here. Things I learned, swallowed, repressed, turned into rules. Desires I swear are mine, but that have a strange scent of approval. Fears I treat as instinct, but that have the exact shape of a sentence I heard too early.

Sometimes I suspect that a good part of my "wanting" is just a polite way for my organism to ask: see me, accept me.

At some point we realize we carry a kind of internal audience. An invisible tribunal. A collection of gazes: family, friends, teachers, lovers, strangers who left a mark deeper than they should have. We say "I," but some days this "I" feels crowded.

Sartre said that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because there's no comfortable escape. Even when I try to hide behind "that's just how it is," "everyone does it," "I had no choice," it's still me choosing. Choosing not to choose, choosing to numb myself. And the bad faith of pretending I don't decide so I don't bear the weight of deciding.

Still, there's an abyss between freedom as a condition and freedom as a sensation.

But if freedom is a condition, why doesn't it come with a feeling of ease? Why does choosing feel so strange?

Because strangeness is the price of leaving autopilot.

Maybe that's it. Freedom doesn't feel like constant lightness, nor like full autonomy. It looks more like a discomfort, a minimal space between impulse and act, between desire and habit, where I can ask: is this mine, or did I just learn to want it this way?

Frankl said that if I can't control everything that crosses through me, I can still choose my stance toward it. A call to respond to life with the meaning I decide to sustain.

But how do you sustain something when you don't know what's yours?

I've been trying a crude method: observing my wanting like someone watching a skittish animal. There are desires that scream, that come with anxiety, comparison, urgency, display. They want to prove something, often to someone who isn't even here anymore. They taste like "after this I'll finally..." They don't ask for calm, they ask for performance.

And there are others that speak softly. They barely seem like desire, they seem more like alignment, a quiet "yes." They don't make me euphoric, they make me whole. I can be alone with them without needing to tell anyone.

Maybe that's a clue: what's mine withstands silence, and what isn't needs noise.

And here's an irony: I only do this work of observing myself because I was crossed by others before.

Because I read Camus and faced the absurd. Because I read Sartre and understood that even running away is a choice. The rest came as echo: Freud and Frankl just gave a name (and direction) to a conflict that was already in me.

So maybe individuality isn't the absence of the other. Maybe it's the unique way I shape what came from the other.

The right question might not be "where does the self come from?" as if there were an inaugural point, an origin that would explain everything. Maybe the question is more alive: where does today's self come from?

I don't think there's a "true self" hidden somewhere. What exists is this pile of voices and, every now and then, a small space between them. A gap where I can notice: is this rush mine, or is it fear of being left behind? Is this dream mine, or is it a way of asking for permission?

I don't always know. Sometimes the only honesty is admitting: not yet.

But just noticing the question before acting, something already changes. Even if only by a millimeter.

And lately, it's in that millimeter that I've been living.