The Self: a Chaotic System with Deterministic Rules

My younger sister asked me this question on a breezy evening when we took a slow walk after dinner. “To go away or to come back, which one is harder?”. It was interesting for me to realise that at this point in life, to come back is somewhat harder. As I told her, after every trip one took, one has changed in some ways, thus one has become a new version of oneself. It is, to a certain extent, scary to think that when coming back to an old place, we may lose the version of ourselves that we have put so much time and effort into building. I’ve just come back home and will stay here for six months. This question and this fear are therefore more relevant than ever. 

For the past 3 years, I spent most of my time abroad, for studies and for work. Each year, I came back home for three to four weeks. Gradually, it felt as if I had lost a sense of my old self, the self that I cultivated in the place I call “home” for almost 20 years. It’s not like I rejected it, attempted to erase it, nor found it worse. It is more like, when I had the chance to go out into the world and got the freedom to build myself in whatever way I wanted to, such experiences were almost addictive. We all crave freedom, don’t we? It is not always possible that we could go to a place where we know no one and no one knows us. There, we are free to start fresh, to act as our true self without being afraid of judgement, to explore our possibilities, to fail and to stand up again and again on our own, to curate ourselves in the way we want to without the influence of the familiar people and things we have stayed with for our whole life. In those new and far-away lands, we have the choice to rebuild our self, to start a second life, metaphorically.

I don’t believe the self is static. It changes constantly to integrate the new experiences we collect throughout our life. That is why the very fear that I may return to the self I was before is not exactly an exaggeration. It is indeed very real. It is, more than a mere piece of intangible thought, a way of us predicting the potential changes in the future and preparing necessary actions for them. Yet, I find this period of coming back to where I call my home an important one in my life. In any possible universes, we can’t refute the existence of a place we call home. It shaped us, it gave us the very first identity, it followed us to everywhere we go, in our mind, in our heart. It is no use denying that fact. It is no use accepting that the self we were given is the only one we can stick to for our whole life neither. Instead, I believe that as we grow up, we should reflect seriously on that given self and see whether it’s compatible for us and the future we want to build or not. I find it important that one goes away so that one can start fresh, break free, learn, and rebuild oneself, as one grows up. And it is alright that ourselves will change drastically in accordance with our new experiences. As I explained before, it is vital that we update ourselves when the right experiences come. And yet, at the very core, there are things we don’t hope to lose. The self, thus, is the product of a constant negotiation between what we want to change and what we are not willing to lose. 

I usually imagine the self as a chaotic system with deterministic rules. The rules are what we want to build as our core, expressed as our moral values, purposes, future goals, our working system, etc. The seemingly chaotic manifestations are the results of the constant negotiation we are in with our life experiences; they change, they update, fix themselves, they adapt. The core, the deterministic rules, may not be as concrete and stable when we are younger as when we are older, which may explain why we are easier to get swayed between options, confused about our future, be influenced by external forces, etc. when we are young. It is not a guarantee that our core will get stronger with age; it depends on the individual’s reflective effort to determine whether they are able to build a strong core of self. I believe that a strong core of self is what allows us to go through the uncertainty and chaotic stream of experiences of life in a way that doesn’t erase the values that should have stayed with(in) us. 

Yesterday, when I went through my collection of old notebooks, it was interesting for me to see some of the ideas and thoughts I had back then are what I consider important lessons of my life for the past few years. It is also puzzling that those ideas never comforted me when I was younger despite me thinking of them and writing about them almost everyday. In fact, my teenage years were probably the most confusing, depressing, rebellious, and trapped years of my life even though I had the pretty much similar pile of ideas as what I have now. Why the difference? One way I can make sense of it is that there was a mismatch between my internal world and the external reality I was going through in terms of their complexity. As a child, a very young girl, my external reality didn’t give me the experiences that could prove to me those thoughts, ideas, and lessons of mine are actually right or helpful. I was fighting in my own head trying to keep the belief that all those things I reflected on and thought about were worthwhile, in the lack of an external life that didn’t give me the signal I needed. Therefore, we can say that when life goes the way we enjoy, i.e., when our values and ideas are justified, nurtured, or positively adjusted by our experiences, it must be the collaboration between our inner world and our external reality. They must match each other in some ways, such as their levels of complexity, their harmony, their complementary for each other, etc. In the absence or devastation of one, the other cannot help us grow and become positive on its own. 

Here, we can come back to our initial discussion: the fear of losing the self we have curated during our time of going away when we come back to the place we call home. Based on our discussion (with hypothetical conclusions) above, the solution to this fear may be quite simple: to continue reflecting on our core & to seek positive experiences in our home place. Because the truth is that, going away is not the only way we can seek the experiences that help us grow in a way that liberates and enriches our mind and life. Perhaps, we just never succeeded in finding one back home, which doesn’t mean they don’t exist there. That simply means we haven’t found them there. So, give it one more try this time. Because who knows, finding them out may fix our relationships with a place that’s so intimate to ourselves that no matter where we go or how far we go, it would still follow us through time and space.

LYNN