Displacement of the Self

An old woman sits beside the window in her small white room, overlooking the city below from the ninth floor of her assisted living residence. Her life is near its end and yet she is filled with emptiness as if it never began at all. A widow, mother of three children, retired church secretary: all these aspects of her life have faded away with the color of her hair, the softness of her skin and her mind’s agility and vigor . Having centered her identity around all these external factors in life, her sense of emptiness arises from their loss. Nonpermanent realities replace the constant of our identities. As those realities, our physical body, loved ones, careers, maternal roles, all come to end at some point before we die, those who define their existence through nonpermanent entities, will eventually lose themselves, their sanity, their identity, after those others are gone.

Never mistaken, it is easier to define yourself through those realities in which your soul exists yet it is easier to lose yourself once you’ve lost those realities. While paradox never fails to clarify life, just the opposite, it is difficult to not attach yourself and identity onto those people around you and the external factors that provide meaning to your existence. Most of the time this happens unknowingly and before you even realize, you adapt illusions of companionship to being essential to your existence. Your career, the monotonous daily routine of your everyday becomes too familiar to ever imagine parting from it. Your physical body, the stunning image of familiarity reflected in the mirror each day, loses its endurance, aesthetic appeal and usefulness. Those other beings around you who you spend your whole life caring for, providing for will eventually fail to need you. Those who you love will die or worse, betray your love and rip themselves from the identity you established together, leaving you with a emptiness in your heart so grand, there isn’t enough left of yourself to continue on as a living being. You become half alive. You are like a child again, only left out in the street to reconfigure how to survive, to communicate, learning how to walk, learn and breath. Loneliness becomes unbearable and conversation becomes a memory. The accumulation of suffering felt by this loss is only mounted by knowing the part of your life who you defined yourself through, who defined themselves through you, has failed to exhibit the same agony your soul is undergoing. While you wander alone at night, sleepless and mostly dead, they have already replaced you with another, as if you didn’t mean anything.

Yet to remain centered and secure in a sense of yourself, free from external beings, realities, definitions, sublevel words used to describe the world around us as language deduces everything we verbalize to subject of our limitations as humans is to immortalize your soul. Whatever may enter or exit your life, there is still one constant. While everything in the world has or will prove its impermanence, that sense of self has withstood the credence of time and persevered while the world crumbled around you.

It is time for a new declaration.

After losing what I believed to be the counterpart to my existence, I have realized that I never truly lost the part of myself I associated with him. It’s been here all along and after mistaking it for so long it didn’t reappear for some time. There are those in life who will affect your identity through different roles. Those who make you doubt yourself, those who penetrate and destroy you from the inside out, and those who will try to make you lose yourself.
Yet there are those who will see you and fall in love with everything you are, the way you are, perfect as a whole, steadfast independent being. They will encourage and celebrate your abilities and refrain from destroying who you are.

In the end, it is not only dangerous to displace the self on those impermanent figures in your life, but to allow those figures to dampen, injure and destroy your sense of identity. They will find enjoyment in your destruction and draw the breath of life from your chest until you can do nothing more but beg them for mercy.

Exponentially, life increases through positives. Therefore it can only grow through those positives. Remaining among those negative factors will ultimately lead to the end.

Freedom is only attainable after everything else is lost.

Life can only flourish in light.

The self should never be displaced in undeserving impermanence.

In the end, you will always have your self.