Every couple of years or so I get a strong urge to reinvent myself. I might look it up and unleash the slurry of tips on ‘how to reinvent yourself’. ‘Its never too late’, some say. ‘Build it into your habits’. ‘Surround yourself with the right people’. ‘Set goals and track them’. ‘Understand your why’. ‘Dress like it’. I might even make a few mental notes on these and at times if I’m feeling particularly optimistic, I’d think ‘This sounds about right. I’ll start tomorrow’.
I don’t, of course. I go on living the way I’d been living for the past decades, and maybe roughly two years from then I’m hit with this same feeling again — ‘shit. how much time has passed? how old am i? i’d really need to reinvent myself now.’
I’m not entirely sure where this feeling of the need to reinvent myself comes from. There is some latent discontent, I suppose. Not that I am unhappy. Neither can this feeling be attributed to the need to change particular external factors — its not about a change in career, or feeling stuck in a relationship, or feeling unhealthy. I guess I could cultivate a neater, more beautiful environment — there’s that; and perhaps more friendships.
It does seem as if this general discontent may be more existential in nature. I’d quite like to be the kind of person who can reinvent themselves on the daily, to create my being and my path as I walk it. I’d like to be an artist one day, or an explorer the next; to write and constantly re-write my narrative, my inner dialogues and thought processes.
In some ways, my being itself, or ‘the way I am’, makes me feel bound and limited. This could relate to what Sartre and Beauvoir referred to as facticity — all the factors that shaped my being to which I had no choice over — when, where, and the family to whom I was born, my neurology, the ways I was raised and the deep imprints of my environment on me. All these occurred quite by chance or by someone else’s predetermination, and since who we are is shaped so much by our early years (psychologists theorise that the bulk of our cognition and memories are made up of our existence from pregnancy to the first three years of life), everything in our lives may feel like it has already been predetermined. How much of our lives do we then have a choice over? What can the idea of ‘reinventing ourselves’ even mean in the face of this?
The great paradox, of course, is that none of this really matters. In the larger scale of things, I, like most people on the planet, will live and die without making so much as a mark on the world. And precisely because we are universally fleeting is why on a personal level, our existence and our choices, for ourselves, is infinite. We make meaning for ourselves; we assign ourselves a purpose.
My process of ‘reinvention’ then, or rather, let’s just call it what it is, because it is no different from ‘living’, may begin with exercising freedom. The freedom to choose differently where I can, even in the minute details of everyday living. The freedom to transform drudgery into mindful practice. The freedom to choose that which empowers rather than fear.
Sartre and Beauvoir pose that the opposite end of facticity is transcendence — to rise above the factors that predetermine our lives and become the person of our choice. As with most things, I suppose we live our lives straddling the difference between the two.
How then shall I come back to the idea of reinventing myself, or how might I react the next time I have this feeling? One notion that helps me is Beauvoir’s insight that because we are relational beings and we become who we are in relation to other people, we cannot reinvent ourselves without reinventing the world for others. This pursuit, in itself, makes me an active participant in a continuous process of shaping my narrative in relation to others in the world around me, and supporting them to shape theirs in relation to mine. This feels like it as good a purpose for one person to have as any.
