Self-actualisation must be embodied

Manifesting the best version of one’s true self is not an intellectual exercise. The process must be realised purely through one’s actions, even when encountering failure

When I reflect on my childhood and my school years, the most predominant feeling that resurfaces is how strongly I desired to be an adult. Growing older was exciting because I was leaving behind the lack of agency I associated with being a child. All my school years, I couldn’t wait to pass and begin junior college, and when I was finally at that phase, I was dreaming about graduation. I remember wanting to quit my first year of my post-grad at JNU because I felt I didn’t belong there. My professor urged me to complete the second year and ‘be done with it’. I am grateful that I followed that advice. But do you see the underlying pattern? The continuous seeking of futurity instead of fully inhabiting the now that was then. Wanting, always, to outgrow the experience as I was having it. These days when I read about the process of ‘reparenting’, which includes healing your inner child as you care for a child, I have been trying to reconnect with my version of this concept.

Yesterday my father sent me a photograph of me when I was a day old. I look like a brown potato. I am all slanted eyes and open mouth and a thousand shades darker than our child was when he was ushered out of my womb. In one image, I am nestled right below my mother’s arm. I can see both her wrists and the gold bangles she’s wearing stand out. Our skin colours seem to match perfectly. I look like I came from her. Flesh of her flesh. Bone of her bone. In the second photograph, I am in the transparent crib they use to keep babies in hospitals. I’ve my wristband on my left hand and I am fast asleep. I have no memory of either of these images and it is somewhat special to see them now, in the light of motherhood. Because I am suddenly navigating the experience of re-inhabiting the spaces that I had already familiarised myself with through the new perspective of a toddler. This means I gaze differently at the same streets I had grown accustomed to walking past briskly on evening walks soon after I moved here. As our child reaches out his fingers so they can rub against the surfaces of the walls or the grasses or vines, I notice their particularities. Everything takes a lot longer and I suppose this is how the feeling of time is itself altered.

This sense of elongated time is what marks parenthood. It is confusing, because time feels like a mirage. Can you imagine that in the first year of your life, your body went through more transformations than it ever would again? In the span of 12 months, a baby moves from hapless infant that cannot hold up its own head to a creature that’s rolling over, then crawling, then pulling to stand and cruising until it finally walks. Everyone tells you that infants don’t remember things when they grow old, just like I have little memory of being one day old photographed possibly by my father. But I am sure that the memories get stored as emotion and become part of the body’s muscular composition.

I don’t know at what point in my life I stopped embracing play as a form of learning. At what point I became so hung up on people pleasing and succeeding. I am trying, these days, to reconnect with the memories I have of my childhood self and the insecurities I grew up with in the embrace of this older-wiser-feminist self. It’s like I am trying to go back in time, into some parallel dimension in order to hug all those prior manifestations of me in the hope of reconstituting a continuity across these selves and restructuring my core identity. You could say I am belatedly empathising with all those versions of me and in doing so, attempting the opposite of shedding: re-gathering.

While flipping through TikTok channels I once saw these words appear: the opposite of belonging is fitting in. When I googled, I found it is credited to Dr Brené Brown. It stayed with me because it seemed antithetical. I had thought the two conditions were somewhat synonymous. But the more I think about it, the more wisdom I find in that dictum. The quote is apparently from a Netflix lecture by Brown. Here is its extension: ‘Fitting in is assessing and acclimating. ‘Here is what I should say/be, here is what I shouldn’t say, here is what I should avoid talking about, here’s what I should dress like/look like,’ that’s fitting in. Belonging, is belonging to yourself first… Speaking your truth, telling your story and never betraying yourself for other people. True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are, it requires you to be who you are. And that’s vulnerable.’

Reading this made me realise that you cannot intellectualise the process of self-actualisation, you must embody it, even if you fail frequently. And isn’t that something more honourable to aspire towards beyond wealth and fame—being the best version of one’s true self?

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx

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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper

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