Am I Enough? - Looking Through The Problem with The Concept on Identity or The Self

Am I enough? What should I do to change? Should I change at all? If I change, who or even what am I? All interesting questions. Who am I? What am I?

I don't believe we can understand ourselves until we define our borders and limitations. Who we are should start at who we are not. If I were to understand who I'm not, I would first assert that I'm not him or her. That seems simple enough. What is harder though is who I am in myself. Who is my person outside of my body or the man in the mirror? What is my Self?

The Self, understood by Carl Jung, is the sum of the conscious, unconscious, and all possible iterations of the personality of man. Every person is in a state of change. Man in his infancy is not the same as his 20 year-old self, though he is still him and not one of his brothers. We can still be different than other people. But, we do change in a few elements within our possible personality make-up. This should create the necessary personality functions to accommodate the need of the person in each parts of his life cycle.

So if we change, what exactly marks you as a person? If one doesn't acknowledge the existence of a soul, then one should root themselves in one's body since one can never truly escape one's body. That is your truest border. The thoughts, the psyche, the person contained in one's body is one's essence. I prefer to say soul, but to each their own if a functional understanding is reached I guess.

Working through this, I gained an understanding that one should never cling on to a definition that one is "a" or "b" as perceived by others as we change all the time. We should never cling onto a definition of ourselves such that we become offended by the criticisms of others. The criticism applies to the deed we did or belief we hold. None should be crucial to the definition we have for ourselves. We should also never cling onto a definition of ourselves such that we fear change.

So, am I enough? Depends on what the situation demands I guess. But, what is clear is if we are having a hard time, if we are suffering, if we are not able to fulfill our responsibilities, changing is an option. We shouldn't feel stuck in our authentic insufficient selves. We should change.

Consider this an idea to ponder.