How To be yourself
We’ve all heard the cliché that you have to go away to find yourself. Pack a bag, leave your city, retreat into silence, strip back the noise until only the real you remains. As if you are Michelangelo’s David, waiting under stone for the conscious chisel to strip away childhood, society, family roles, sexuality, race, until the real you emerges. The trouble is, it almost never works like that. The trouble is that it almost never works like that.
When I think about the moments I have truly discovered something about myself, they haven’t come during grand solitary quests. Solitude has its place of course, as a time to recharge and let the dust settle. I’ve done silent meditation retreats and solo surf trips that have been journeys of discovery, but the sharpest mirrors I have found have been other people. Community, relationships, even the encounters I dreaded. The evenings when I told myself I was too burnt out to go, when the thought of small talk made me recoil, but I went anyway. More often than not I left grateful. Not because the interactions were perfect, and sometimes they weren’t even enjoyable, but because being with others revealed something in me that isolation never could.
The philosophers Hegel, Lacan, and later Axel Honneth all recognised what I stumbled into by accident, the self is not something we uncover alone, but something that only emerges in relation. You only become a subject when you are recognised by another subject. To be me requires the presence of an Other, we could also say anOther. Identity is not a private treasure hidden beneath layers but a relation and recognition. Honneth develops this into his theory of recognition, arguing that self-realisation depends on being recognised in three domains: love, which grounds basic self-confidence through intimate relationships. Rights, which secure recognition as an autonomous person within a legal framework. And solidarity, which affirms valued contributions within a community. Identity is not something unearthed like an ancient relic, it is built through webs of recognition.
Against this stands the contemporary subject, the postmodern self, which Slavoj Žižek describes as caught in a double bind. On one hand there is reflexive freedom or indefinite plasticity, which is the ability to endlessly reinvent yourself. Select any mask or filter, curate an identity through your music, clothing, Instagram posts and hobbies and voila, your authentic self... until you decide to create another identity and keep repeating the process. This apparent freedom becomes a prison. To be authentic now means to constantly refashion yourself, perform individuality, and keep pace with the churn of what is considered relevant. The paradox is that the harder we try to be ourselves, the more conformist we become. Tattoos and piercings once signalled rebellion but are now mainstream. Casual relationships once felt liberating but today monogamy can seem like the radical gesture. Every act of self-expression risks being absorbed as just another commodity, a pre-packaged performance.
Žižek pushes this to a stark conclusion. If you retreat fully from society in search of your true self you become an idiot, cut off from the symbolic order that makes identity possible. But if you fully embrace society’s demand to perform identity you end up stuck in endless refashioning and anxiety. There seems to be no way out. The counterintuitive solution, drawn from Lacan, is to accept that there is no authentic core waiting to be uncovered. The subject is fundamentally alienated, split by language, shaped by the symbolic order. To insist on finding some inner nugget of truth is to miss the point. To traverse the fantasy, in Lacanian terms, is to stop clinging to the idea that beneath the masks lies the real you. Authenticity does not come from peeling away the roles but from recognising that the roles themselves, the masks you wear and play through others, are what make you who you are.
This is not a defeatist conclusion but a liberating one. Once you accept that alienation is fundamental, you no longer waste energy waging war against it. You can begin to play more freely, to take responsibility for shaping your drives and fantasies rather than allowing them to be shaped entirely by capital or ideology or the TikTok trend that’s happening that week. Which brings us back to community. Being yourself is not about retreating into solitude to protect some inner essence. It is about entering into relation with others, recognising and being recognised, shaping and being shaped. Solitude can help us pause and re-centre, but the bulk of who we are is hammered out in the messy, awkward, sometimes draining spaces of social life.