IF WE ALREADY KNOW THAT THE SELF IS FLUID, WHY DO WE KEEP TRYING TO TURN OURSELVES INTO SOMETHING SOLID?
Twelve years ago, I was studying Fine Arts at Central Saint Martins, and I was interested in the idea that identity might not be as singular as we tend to imagine it: that there might not be one fixed self sitting somewhere inside us, waiting to be known. There might instead be something more fluid: selves appearing and disappearing, taking shape in relation to time, context, memory and one another.
At the time, I made a project called Photography of Nothing. The idea came out of a lecture on silence by Hannah Rickards, where I first encountered Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room. In it, Lucier records himself speaking a few sentences, then plays that recording back into the room and records it again. And again. And again. With each repetition, the qualities of the room become more audible. The words gradually dissolve, until the recording is dominated by the room's own tones and harmonics.
I became fascinated by what happens when you repeat something enough times that it stops being what it was.
For Photography of Nothing, I translated this process into images. I would take an image, apply sound effects to it (delay, reverb, distortion), save it and process the result again. And again. Each iteration moved further from the original. Edges softened. Information disappeared. Pixels began to bleed into one another. Eventually the image became so degraded that it could no longer be recognised. There was no longer an original image to look at. And yet, there was still something there.
I have just finished my training in transpersonal psychotherapy, and I find it quietly funny, and a little uncanny, that the thing I was reaching for through art at twenty-two has followed me all this way into psychology. Because I no longer believe I was photographing nothing. I think I was making a portrait of becoming.
Photography of Nothing, Zoé Nguyen (aka Rita C. Silva), 2012
I have been inside the world of personal development long enough to notice a contradiction. We seem to understand, intellectually, that the self is fluid. We change, we grow, we are not who we were. Relationships change us. Grief changes us. Becoming a parent changes us. The body changes, the brain changes, our circumstances change, our desires change.
And yet the moment we enter a therapeutic process, we can begin behaving as though, somewhere underneath all of this, there were a single, solid self waiting to be uncovered. We talk about finding out who we really are, getting back to our true selves, finding our core, discovering our essence, as if the self were a lost object waiting somewhere to be recovered. Healing can start to sound like an excavation: as though the real person were buried underneath everything that has happened to them, and if we dig deeply enough, we finally reach the original.
I know this because I have done my share of digging. I kept looking for the thing underneath the thing. The core beneath the personality. The truth behind the adaptation. The self beneath the selves. And in the end I found nothing at all, just a massive void. Eventually I began to wonder whether the problem was not that I hadn't dug deeply enough, but that there was simply no object waiting at the bottom.
Core. Essence. True self. Find yourself.
Notice what these words do. Each one quietly turns a becoming into a thing. They are nouns, and nouns make us hunt for things: a fixed object we can excavate, hold up to the light, and say, There. That's the real me. Finally. Found it. Done.
But what if there is no done?
What if the self is not what you are, but how you become? What if it has form without having a final form?
What if continuity does not require permanence?
If you freeze a melody in order to inspect it, you don't find its essence. You find silence. A melody's whole being is in its moving. We would never say a song is less real than a stone because we cannot hold it still. It is simply a different kind of real, a more alive kind of real. I think we are like that.
There is no original, but there is an origin. There is history. There are patterns, memories, wounds, relationships, inheritances, choices. There is a particular shape that has emerged from everything that has happened to us. That shape is real, and it is ours. It is simply not the end of the story. The self is alive; it is not a corpse. We keep trying to make photographs of ourselves, when perhaps we are a piece of music. You can't arrive at a melody. You can only play it.
So why, if the fluidity of the self is so easy to grasp as an idea, do we keep organising our lives, and especially our healing, as though it were not true?
The idea of a fixed, autonomous self has a history. It did not appear from nowhere. Different traditions have imagined the self in very different ways, but much of modern Western thought has favoured one kind of subject in particular: singular, self-identical, rational, separate. A subject that can stand apart from the world and know itself cleanly, the way you might know an object resting on a table.
There is nothing wrong with those qualities in themselves. We need boundaries. We need agency. We need enough continuity to make a promise and be held to it. But they have not always been culturally neutral, and I have become interested in the gendered history sitting underneath them. Not because the self can be reduced to a question about gender, but because that history makes visible something we might otherwise mistake for plain common sense.
In this inheritance, the qualities of the proper subject -unity, autonomy, reason, self-possession- have long been coded as masculine. Their opposites -multiplicity, dependence, permeability, changeability- have been placed on the side of the feminine and treated as the lesser term: the thing to be contained, corrected, or explained. I don't mean these qualities belong to men or to women. I mean our tradition has repeatedly arranged them as if they did, and in that arrangement woman appears not as another kind of subject but as the other of the subject. Relation rather than autonomy. Difference rather than identity. The ground a "real" self gets defined against.
I feel the pressure of that history in my own life. The shape I was so often asked to take was singular, consistent, stable, clearly outlined. It was cut from a cloth that never quite fit me. What I am moves more like water than like stone, and I was handed a language built for stone and asked to describe the sea.
Reading Luce Irigaray gave me a way to name what that pressure actually is. Her more unsettling suggestion is not simply that women have been left out of certain concepts, as though the concepts were sound and only the guest list was wrong. It is that the concepts themselves may carry assumptions about what counts as a proper subject. If our very ways of thinking have been built around what can be separated, defined and held at a distance, then fluidity becomes almost impossible to think without quietly turning it back into an object. Even when we try to make room for relationship, embodiment or change, we may still be asking them to enter a room whose grammar was built for things that hold still.
And I hear that same grammar inside the language of selfhood. Even our talk of becoming keeps sliding back towards a finished thing: a self that can at last be known, held, named. The "true self" turns out to be the old ideal subject wearing a gentler face. Singular. Self-identical. Complete.
None of this means the answer is to dissolve into fluidity. If we reject solidity completely, we can simply create a new ideal: the endlessly adaptable person who is always open, fluid and unattached.
A human being needs some structure. We need continuity. We need memory. We need some sense of where one person ends and another begins. We need enough stability to recognise ourselves across time, to keep a promise, to care for someone tomorrow because we cared for them today. A self with no form at all would not be liberated. It would simply be unheld.
So the question isn't whether we should have structure. It is what kind of structure we want and need in order to keep becoming. A rigid structure creates stability by resisting change. A living structure creates stability by being able to change without losing all coherence. A tree has structure, but its structure is not fixed once and then defended. It grows. It bends. It sheds. It responds to its environment. Its form is continuously being made. This is the kind of structure I try to cultivate in myself, and in the therapeutic work I do: boundaries that can breathe; an identity held lightly enough that experience can still change it; enough continuity to stay present while who we are keeps moving.
This gives fluidity a necessary limit; it keeps it honest rather than letting it turn into an excuse. Being a process does not mean we are not accountable for what we do, as though we were a completely different person every morning. In fact, continuity is what makes change matter. It is what allows us to learn, repair, apologise and choose differently. I don't have to be permanently fixed in order to be responsible. I can be changing and still be answerable for the person I am becoming.
Maybe this is part of why change and fluidity frighten us. If there is no fixed core, there is no final guarantee that I know who I am, and then I cannot know in advance who I will become. If I can change, I can also surprise myself. I can lose myself. I can outgrow a life I once wanted and become someone my old identity would not recognise.
So we reach for objects, because they feel safe. If I can say I am anxious, or I am an introvert, or This is my core trauma, I trade the open, frightening horizon of becoming for the predictability of a label. Even a painful identity can feel safer than uncertainty. The freedom of fluidity and the terror of fluidity are in some ways the same thing. We want to be free to become someone new, while also wanting to know that something will hold us together while we do it.
This is why the language of the "true self" is so seductive. It promises both: you can change, it says, and still arrive at the one person you were always meant to be.
I notice this most clearly wherever the self is being sold. Transformation is far easier to sell when it comes with a promised endpoint, a finished self you will one day arrive at and get to keep. What cannot be sold so easily is the truth that becoming does not resolve, that there is no final version waiting, and that you will have to keep showing up for yourself for the rest of your life. And this is not a failure. It is what being alive means. What holds us together may very well be our capacity for relationship, for responsiveness, for continuity through change.
The way we picture the self quietly decides how we picture everything that happens to it, including what goes wrong. If the self is a lost object, then suffering is the distance from it and healing is the journey back.
So it is worth asking the question directly: if the self is not a lost object, then what is suffering?
I have come to think that some forms of psychological suffering can be understood as stuckness. I don't mean that all suffering is pathology, or that every painful experience needs to be transformed. Grief, uncertainty, loneliness and existential pain are not necessarily problems to be fixed. Sometimes suffering is an appropriate response to something difficult or irreducibly human. What I mean is that sometimes a living process loses its ability to move. Something in us that once responded, once adapted, keeps running the old response long after the conditions have changed. It can be a protective pattern that becomes restrictive. A feeling that was interrupted and never got to move all the way through. An identity that has organised itself so tightly around a single adaptation that nothing new is allowed in. A way of relating that is no longer serving us. In each case the issue may not be that we are disconnected from our "real" selves, but that something in us has become rigid.
From a somatic perspective, traumatic experience can involve responses to danger becoming organised into the present, so that the body continues to respond to threat even when the original circumstances are no longer there. The story may tell us that we are safe while our embodied experience has not yet caught up. Understanding what happened can be deeply important. But understanding alone does not necessarily reorganise a pattern. Sometimes healing requires an experience of something happening differently. A different response. A different relationship. A different experience of one's own sensations and boundaries. A different possibility becoming real in the body.
If the difficulty is stuckness, then healing does not have to mean recovering a lost original or installing a better and more permanent structure. It can mean restoring movement: becoming more able to respond to what is happening right now. More able to take in the experience. More able to reorganise when life asks something new. Health stops being a state you arrive at and becomes a capacity you develop.
This changes the questions we might bring into therapy. Instead of asking Who am I, really? we might ask: What is trying to move through me? What has become rigid? What is asking for more room? What becomes possible if I don't have to decide who I am before I experience what is happening? The work becomes less about finding an answer and more about staying present enough to feel what is happening now. The past doesn't stop mattering. It matters less as a place we have to return to in order to recover our original selves, and more as a momentum we carry into the present.
And here is what took me longest to understand. Grasping the idea that we are fluid and that we can change is one thing, but living it is another thing entirely. I can understand why I do what I do. I can trace where it came from. I can tell the story beautifully. And still find myself doing the same thing the moment life touches the old place. There is a long distance between knowing something about ourselves and being able to live differently.
Maybe part of that distance is embodied. Insight can give us language, context and meaning. But a pattern is not only a story about the past. It is also something happening now: in the body, in sensation, in attention, in the way we move towards or away from another person. And it is also now that something can begin to change. I can feel the old reaction rising and, perhaps for a moment, not become completely identified with it. I can notice the impulse to withdraw without immediately closing myself off. I can feel fear without deciding that fear tells me who I am and what I do. I can allow an identity to loosen without rushing to replace it with another one. I can discover, through experience, that uncertainty does not necessarily mean falling apart. That is different from knowing something about myself. Maybe this is why the self cannot be known once and for all. It has to be encountered. And what we encounter is never exactly the same thing twice.
For me this changes the meaning of authenticity. I used to regard it as a loyalty to some inner truth, but it might be more about attention to what is actually moving through me now. What am I feeling? What am I wanting? What am I avoiding? What is changing? What am I pretending not to know? And staying close enough to those things to let them tell me something, without turning them into an identity, knowing that what is true now will not necessarily be the whole of what is true later. It is being willing to let identity remain responsive to experience. The self is not something I arrive at. It keeps arriving.
And it does not arrive alone. It arrives in relationship.
If I am a process rather than a thing, I am a process that happens in contact: with other people, with the places I live, with the culture around me, with the relationships that invite certain parts of me forward and make other parts harder to access. Who I am is not produced entirely inside me. A person can learn to speak more honestly and return to a relationship that punishes honesty. They can develop boundaries and return to a family system that experiences boundaries as rejection. They can become less ashamed of themselves and return to a culture that continues to tell them they are not enough. We do not soften in isolation. We soften in the presence of something that can meet us differently. Sometimes that something is another person. Sometimes it is a new relationship with our own body. Sometimes it is a community. Sometimes it is the possibility of living differently from the conditions that taught us who we were supposed to be.
This is why I have become less interested in the idea of therapy as producing an independent, finished individual. The goal cannot simply be to make someone so internally secure that they no longer need anyone. We are not meant to need nobody. We are meant to become more capable of being in relationship without disappearing inside it. That means the individual, the relational and the collective are not really separate problems. The way we love, the way we raise children, the boundaries we keep, the work we do, the cultures we belong to, and the conditions we live inside all participate in the shape a person can hold. To free a self and leave its field untouched has limits we do not always want to name. Sometimes the person needs to change. Sometimes the relationship needs to change. Sometimes the environment needs to change. Often, it is some combination of all three.
This may be another reason the fantasy of a fixed self is so appealing. If the problem is entirely inside me, then the solution is entirely inside me too. I can fix myself. I can heal myself. I can become better. But if the self is relational, then some of what needs to change is not mine alone to change. This can be frightening or a relief depending on the person.
There is another tension I would like to mention. Identity being fluid doesn't mean it is meaningless. We need names for things. We need language. We need categories that allow us to recognise ourselves and find one another. Identity can constrain us, but it can also shelter us. For people who have been told that they are too much, too sensitive, too difficult, too different, finding a name for their experience can be profoundly liberating. A category can be a cage. It can also be a door.
The problem is not necessarily having an identity. It is mistaking an identity for the entirety of a person. I can say who I am without pretending that I know everything I can become. Perhaps the healthiest relationship to identity is neither total attachment nor total rejection. It is holding it as something real, useful and provisional. A shape. But not a prison.
This is why I have become less interested in the question Who am I, really? Because it can make us look back, searching for evidence, and keep us looking for an original image that may never have existed in the way we imagine. I'm more interested in the questions that don't ask us to discover a final answer, but to become more capable of staying in unknowing. And maybe that is what maturity is: not arriving at who you are, but becoming more able to remain in relationship with who you are becoming.
I think of those dissolving images now with a kind of tenderness. When I was twenty-two I thought I was watching a picture being destroyed. Now I think I was watching something else. There came a point where the image could no longer be recognised, where the original could not be recovered and there was no pristine photograph waiting underneath the distortion for me to uncover. But what remained was never nothing. There was no hidden, original image under the distortion, because the distortion was never simply covering the image. It was what the image had become. And perhaps a self is like that too.
The adaptations, the roles, the defences, the history, the relationships, the things we learned to do in order to survive — these are not necessarily a costume laid over some truer self underneath. They are part of the material from which the self is made. They have shaped its contours. They have left traces. They have become part of its way of moving through the world. This does not mean that everything we have become needs to be preserved. Some forms of ourselves will become too small. Some identities will become too rigid. Some ways of protecting ourselves will eventually prevent the very intimacy they once made possible. Some things will need to dissolve. And that dissolution can feel like loss. We can mistake the loss of a familiar form for the loss of ourselves. But a form coming apart is not always evidence that something has gone wrong. Sometimes it means that the form can no longer hold the life moving through it.
A human life was never a problem to be solved, never a project with a finish line. There is no point at which we become completely healed, completely coherent, completely certain. There will always be another relationship, another loss, another beginning, another part of ourselves we have not yet met. This doesn't make working on yourself futile — it makes it alive. I don't think we need to choose between having a self and being in process. We can have form without having a final form. We can have boundaries without becoming sealed. We can have continuity without permanence. We can be accountable without being fixed. We can know ourselves without believing that we have finally finished knowing ourselves. And maybe this is what I was trying to see in those images all those years ago: the movement by which something remains recognisably itself while continually becoming something else.
Together we heal.
R.
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