Most of us probably agree that it’s a worthy goal to “become more yourself.”
But what does that actually mean?
I think the answer depends entirely on the story you are living inside.
If we are living in the modern, enlightenment story of the sovereign self that lives in a silent universe - becoming yourself means maximizing your potential. Developing your capacities, achieving your goals, becoming the fullest version of the self you were always capable of being. You try to grow towards your ideal self - the one that is more productive or more healed or more autonomous or more free. The measure of becoming yourself is largely external (and therefore also comparative). Are you becoming more than you were? Are you closing the gap between who you are and who you could be?
This version of “become yourself” is so embedded in our culture that most of us have never questioned it. It feels like common sense. It feels like what the phrase obviously means.
But I want to contrast this story with a new and ancient story about Reality - a more participatory cosmology, where you are not an isolated self in a silent universe, striving to maximize your potential against a neutral backdrop. Instead, you are a specific, unrepeatble form of the cosmo’s own interiority - the particular shape that the universe’s self-knowing is taking in you and no one else. Your becoming is not separate from the cosmo’s becoming. It is a node within it.
Which means “become yourself” is not a self-improvement project. It is a cosmological one.
And it has four dimensions that the modern enlightenment story cannot see.
Dimension 1: Shadow Work - face what you have not faced
Every person, by virtue of having been raised in a particular family and culture, has developed certain capacities and buried others. The buried material does not disappear. It goes underground — into what Jung called the shadow — and runs from there, often with far more force than anything we are consciously directing.
The shadow is not only darkness - what we suppressed includes our genuine gifts as much as our genuine wounds. The person who was taught that anger was unacceptable suppressed not just the destructive rage but the healthy self-assertion, the capacity to hold a boundary, the force that says this matters and I will defend it. The person who was taught that vulnerability was weakness suppressed not just the grief but the depth of connection that grief alone makes possible. The gold is in the shadow as much as the poison.
Becoming yourself begins here - not building toward an ideal, but with descending toward what has been avoided. This is not therapeutic in the managed, clinical sense of identifying a dysfunction and correcting it. It is the willingness to let what seemed like your foundation turn out to be a defense.
You cannot be whole without what you have split off. The split-off parts are still you - perhaps the most you. The first dimension of genuine becoming is the willingness to go toward what you have been going away from.
Dimension 2: True Self - relaxing the performed self
Beneath the shadow work, something even more fundamental waits.
Over the course of your life, you have developed a way of being in the world - a presented self, a performance of personhood - that was shaped by what was rewarded, what was punished, and what was required to survive and belong in the particular world you were born into. This performed self is not a lie. It was the self that had to be. It got you here.
But it is not the whole self. And it has, in many cases, almost no relationship to what you actually want, what you actually care about, what actually moves you when nothing is watching.
Donald Winnicott, the psychoanalyst, called this the distinction between the True Self and the False Self. Richard Schwartz’s IFS maps it precisely: the managers — the parts of you that run the performance, that keep you productive and presentable and safe — are doing their job brilliantly. But their job was designed for a crisis that may have passed decades ago. And the cost of their vigilance is that the more genuine, more vulnerable, more actually-alive parts of you never quite make it to the surface.
The second dimension of becoming yourself is the gradual, often disorienting emergence of this more genuine self. Not by destroying the performed self, but by finding a different relationship to it. When the performing parts begin to relax, what they were protecting surfaces. Genuine desires you had written off, or genuine aversions you had overridden with obligation. A genuine sense of what matters to you.
This is why genuine self-becoming often looks, from the outside, like crisis. The successful person who realizes they have been performing success for twenty years and have no idea what they actually want. The faithful person who realizes they have been believing what they were supposed to believe rather than what they actually, in their depths, find to be real. These are not breakdowns - they might be the real self beginning to surface.
In the participatory story, this emergence is not just personal. It is cosmological. The universe is trying to know itself through you - specifically, irreplaceably through you. Every year you spend performing a self that is not yours is a year the universe’s self-knowing in your particular form goes unrealized. The stakes of genuine self-emergence are not only personal. They are, in the fullest sense, cosmic. (Not to add any pressure… :)
Dimension 3: Calling - discern your vocation
Every life has a specific form - a particular gift, a particular way of participating in the larger unfolding that belongs to this life and not any other. I don’t mean a predetermined destiny imposed from outside. Something more like what the Quakers mean by “way opening” - the gradual emergence, through paying attention, of what this life is most genuinely oriented toward at its deepest level.
The philosopher James Hillman called it the daimon — the particular image or form that each soul carries, the thing that has been trying to express itself through you your whole life, often in spite of you. Your unique acorn that is wanting to become an oak tree. Bill Plotkin calls it the soul’s code - the mythic, poetic sense of what your specific life is for. It cannot be discovered by strategic planning - only by a quality of patient, receptive attention to what keeps showing up, what you cannot help caring about, what breaks your heart in a way that feels like recognition rather than wound.
Vocation in this sense is not a job. It is the particular form of participation that only you can make. There is no universal metric. There is only the question: what is this life for, specifically?
And the participatory claim is that this is not a merely private question. Your vocation is the cosmos’s way of doing something through you that it cannot do any other way. Which means discerning it is not self-indulgence. It is your responsibility to the whole.
Dimension 4: Love - becoming capable of real encounter
All of this - shadow integration, the emergence of the True Self, the discernment of vocation - is in service of something that makes it worthwhile. Not happiness. Not even wholeness, exactly. But the capacity for genuine encounter with another person, another creature, or even the living world.
Martin Buber called the difference I-It vs. I-Thou. I-It is the encounter that is mediated by my own unprocessed need - in which I am not actually seeing the person in front of me but a screen onto which I am projecting my own unfinished interior business. I-Thou is genuine encounter: the other met as a subject, real, not assimilated to my own story about who they are or what I need them to be.
The person who has not done the work of the first three dimensions cannot fully access I-Thou. Because the unintegrated shadow colonizes perception, the performed self cannot risk genuine exposure, and the undiscerned vocation leaves the person always slightly elsewhere - reaching for something they cannot quite name. What looks like love is often a complex negotiation between two sets of unmet needs.
The movement through the four dimensions - which is never linear, never complete, always a direction rather than a destination - is simultaneously a movement toward the capacity to actually see and be seen. The self that has found its own ground can finally stop defending it. It can afford genuine presence. It can love without needing the love to fix something that only inner work can fix.
This is why, in the participatory story, the development of the individual and the quality of community are not separate projects. They are the same project, seen from different angles. The more fully each person becomes themselves, the more genuinely they can be present to others. And the community that holds people well in their becoming is itself transformed by the quality of presence that becomes possible within it.
Becoming yourself, in the participatory story, is not self-improvement.
It is the willingness to face what you have buried, to let the performed self finally rest, to discern the specific form your participation in this cosmos is meant to take, and to become - through all of that - genuinely capable of love.
This is the work the participation story calls us to.
And it is not yours alone. The cosmos is doing something through you that it cannot do any other way.