“Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterward.” —Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, 1945
I once spiralled for months at 18 after a conversation with my friend V, a bold, expressive artist who seemed to drip authenticity from her pores. She told me she could ‘see people’s aura colours’ and said mine was light blue. She meant it kindly, casually, with no edge in her voice. But I took it as an indictment: You’re forgettable. You fade into the background. V, of course, radiated something like deep violet or blood-red, unmistakably vivid, saturated with presence.
Back then, that stung. I kept asking: Why don’t I have a clear sense of self? Why do I change so much depending on who I’m with? Around some friends I was loud, quick-witted, electric. Around others, I’d shrink into myself and speak in half-sentences. Was I eternally fragmented - a shapeshifter with no center? I felt blurry to myself.
Today, if we’re still playing the aura game, my aspirational aura is Phthalo (RGB 18,53,36), the shade of people who are starting to know what they are.
I had thought my sense of self was eternally lost and I was destined to be blurry forever. But now I think I was just… young and unformed, yet to emerge. I hadn’t been through enough cycles in the Lore Machine to start becoming real.
from ghost to character
A frame to consider: instead of trying to ‘find yourself’ like a lost set of keys, what if you thought of it more like fermentation? Venkatesh Rao’s concept of Life Intensification offers one of the most compelling metaphors for personality development I’ve read:
“I have an alternative frame that I call life intensification; an idea of progressive fermentation and distillation of your life spirit from an unfermented mash to a 140-proof alcohol (no actual drinking necessary). A path of increasing ‘life drunkenness’ as you go from ethereal youth to fully alive adult maturity, aging like a fine scotch along the way…a growing aliveness to the actual change that you're undergoing in the process of generating responses to specific life challenges
In other words, what you’re intensifying is something like your aliveness and responsiveness to the world. Life intensification is about participating in your own narrative, surrendering to the improvisational rhythm of becoming. You loosen your grip on how you thought life should look, and allow something weirder, more specific, more you to emerge. As he explains:
“At 14, you're something like a ghost: a cloud of potential, along with a bunch of ideas about how that potential should be actualised. You're not quite real. Some people stay ethereal. As ghostly at 70 as they were at 14. Others intensify with every experience, whether they win or lose.”
This is also where Bergson’s idea of élan vital, the vital force and animating current of life, flows into the frame. Becoming real means making yourself permeable to it through letting that current surge through you, carve you, grow you.
Unlike what I used to believe, it appears becoming real, the act of becoming someone, seems to have nothing to do with finally unearthing some hidden True Self that’s been waiting under your bed all along. When I was 18, I thought if I just thought hard enough, journaled long enough, I could somehow think myself into coherence. But I’ve come to believe it doesn’t work like that at all. Becoming yourself is not a lightning-bolt revelation after a trip to Japan or a breakthrough on a psychedelic retreat (though, to be fair, that one can help, so maybe look into it). It’s slower and messier. It’s a process of submitting yourself to the feedback loop of reality, of letting yourself be shaped by the friction of actual experience.
Think of it like moving from being an NPC to becoming a main character, from observer to protaganist - no longer running background scripts, but responding in real time, animated by agency, with a plotline that twists in unexpected ways. It’s about loosening your grip on the life you imagined, and instead learning to commit to the one that’s actually unfolding. Rao being quotable again:
“Life intensification is the process of consciously becoming increasingly real … by letting go more and more of your idea of what your life should be like, and embracing the possibilities of what it is actually turning out to be like.”
The real becomes visible through contact with the world, with other people, and with your own strangeness.
Lately, I’ve started to feel the effects of this slow becoming.
I used to find it painfully difficult to express myself in a way that felt true. There was always a lag, a gap between what I felt and what I could say. My inner world was vivid, but getting it out felt like trying to translate colour into grayscale. Now, thoughts often arrive fully formed. Expressing myself feels easier, sometimes almost effortless and fluid, like the friction is lower. In the past three days, I’ve written three essays that all feel unmistakably mine and reflective of my inner spirit: in tone, in texture, in worldview. My friend, M, said my Substack is an accurate representation of how they perceive me. The link between my brain, heart, and lips has shortened, where it used to feel like a gulf.
I think this is what happens when enough feedback loops have run their course. When you’ve been shaped by the right people, cracked open by the right questions, humbled by your own contradictions, and reflected on it all long enough to build an internal coherence. The static finally silences and signal gets stronger. You stop performing and start expressing. This has nothing to do with magically figuring out who You are, but because you’re no longer afraid to show up as the version that’s real right now. You’re willing to speak as the person you are - in motion, in flux, but already worth hearing.
the people who sharpen you
So, how does this process actually unfold? In my experience, the people around you have an outsized influence. Some people make you feel like you’re breathing cleaner air just by being near them. Their presence clarifies you, because they’re fully themselves and they model what it looks like to have integrated edges. They elegantly move through the world with a vivid interior and a language that matches.
O is a friend who had this effect on me. For her 19th birthday years ago, I wrote her a poem. In it, I described her as the colour dark blue - rich, specific, unmistakable, the kind of colour you notice. She exudes a self-assuredness that’s both warm and unmistakable, with a strength in the lack of inner static. Being around her made me realise how much noise I still carried. It wasn’t envy I felt, exactly, but more a kind of reverent recognition. This is what it looks like when someone knows themselves and it was beautiful to witness.
Some people, like my friend O, illuminate the gap between who we are and who we could be. They show us simply by being that there is another way to inhabit yourself, because their clarity casts light on our blur. Their rootedness makes our own hesitation more visible. In my experience, this is sometimes fairly uncomfortable to feel. Sometimes it feels like standing next to a finished painting when you’re still sketching the first lines of your outline. But it’s in that contrast, that ache of distance, that the journey may begin.
Some people help us become by what they awaken in us. Others help us become by what they make us long for.
The truth is, becoming often begins in a moment of lack and a glimpse of difference. You meet someone vivid, and you realise you’ve been blurry. You hear someone speak with clarity, and realise your own voice wavers. In that moment of contrast, in the quiet sting of comparison, you begin to articulate a new self and name the shape you want to grow into. In the gap, we create a door for ourselves to walk through.
But rather than being shame, that’s the spark of transformation. And if you’re lucky, these people don’t just mirror what’s missing, but also help midwife what’s emerging.
Henrik Karlsson writes beautifully about this in his essay on relationships as co-evolutionary loops, one of my favourite essays of all-time:
when I see someone who is comfortable in their unique strangeness, too. There probably exists someone who enabled that evolution of personality. A parent, a friend group, a spouse. It is rare for people to come into themselves if no one is excited and curious about their core, their potential. We need someone who gives us space to unfold.
I once told a close friend, “I feel like I can just unfold around you.” And I meant it in a very physical way, like my psyche was a tightly packed origami animal finally given permission to stretch out in the sun.
My friend M and I have a term for these kinds of people: container people.
Container people are rare and transformative. They hold space for you, and in that, they hold you. With them, you don’t have to measure your words or pre-chew your thoughts. You don’t have to shrink your bigness or amplify your softness. You don’t have to be only the parts of yourself that are easily lovable. You know - intuitively, somatically - that whatever you release, they can contain.
Your sorrow, your sharpness, your weirdest metaphors, your contradictory moods, your longing to be held and your need to be alone. All of it fits. Their presence communicates something simple and sacred: You’re safe here. You can be all of it here.
These people are self-actualisation accelerators. They witness you into being, because they are safe and delighted by your specificity. Around them, you release the urge to self-monitor, trim edges, or edit your syntax. You get to just be - and in being, you sharpen. You discover yourself by hearing your own voice ring out freely, unfiltered.
Even just witnessing someone live bravely can make you braver. Seeing a friend be open, raw, or deeply weird gives you permission to try the same. You expand just through proximity. You recalibrate what's possible simply by observing them hold more of themselves, and stay loved anyway.
In that sense, becoming is often viral. Selfhood is contagious. One person standing firmly in their specificity can spark a cascade of emergence in the people around them, in one of the most beautiful butterfly effects we can witness.
“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me. Different words and different tones.”
— Virginia Woolf
We don’t just become more ourselves around certain people - we become legible, and expressible. If I may use an artificial intelligence metaphor, it’s like we’re being prompted. The input of the other changes, and so does our output. Our vocabulary stretches, our tone softens or sharpens. The self can be thought of as a responsive interface, not a static script.
But not every teacher is a container; some are mirrors by contrast.
what you are not also reveals who you are
Not everyone will make you feel expansive. In fact, some people have the opposite effect and will make you shrink. You’ll leave the conversation with a weird taste in your mouth, noticing yourself over-explaining or under-speaking. These people can be just as clarifying, because they serve as anti-containers.
In other words, the people you don’t vibe with are data points, because they show you what matters to you by contrast. If someone’s sarcasm feels draining, maybe you value sincerity. If their bluntness grates, maybe you’re someone who holds kindness sacred (these are real examples for me). The gut-level resistance you feel around some people can be diagnostic, rather than judgment. I think your values start to emerge as subtle preferences, frictions, reactions, rather than fully formed commandments. Over time, those tiny signals begin to cohere into something resembling a shape.
sculpting the self
I think selfhood, then, is an emergent property. We are shaped through the dance of contact and withdrawal, resonance and dissonance. The metaphor that keeps circling back to me is sculpture: the soul begins as a raw block of stone. Each experience, each relationship, each moment of reflection is a chisel. Some cuts are jagged (like heartbreak), some gentle (like existing in someone’s loving awareness), but they all help remove what we are not.
What remains is dynamic silhouette. We are a character being written in real time, refined with every iteration.
This is the spiritual analogue to machine learning’s exploration vs. exploitation tradeoff - a frame I borrow from Ben Kuhn’s writing. Early in life, we must explore widely: try on traits, sample social contexts, test different rhythms of being. Later, as patterns emerge, we begin to exploit -committing more deeply to the people, practices, and philosophies that resonate. But it never stops entirely. The self is an ongoing training model.
Or to borrow a more poetic metaphor I wrote about in my first substack piece: perhaps we each carry obscure colours in our psyche, hues that don’t yet have names because we haven’t shone the right light on them. Our job is to discover the palette - brush away the dust, dim the noise, carve ourselves toward clarity.
becoming real is a social process
I think a helpful way to understand the quest for selfhood is as a relational project, not some solo hero’s journey existing in a vacuum. We unfold through the wonderfully chaotic, beautiful and painful Lore Machine of life: contact, conflict, love, loss, awkward dinners, late-night texts, long silences. Most of all - the presence of those rare people who see the outlines of your becoming and say: keep going.
Some people stay ghosts AND refuse to update. They hold tightly to the persona they built at 17, even as life begs them to adapt. Others choose to intensify by alchemising experience into signal. They let relationships chisel them into realness and stay willing to be wrong, to be reshaped, to become strange to themselves.
And even then, you never fully arrive. Because realness is way of relating to your unfolding. You’re the block of stone, and the chisel, and the artist, and the workshop. Keep sculpting.
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As Kafka writes in a beautifully romantic letter to Milena that’s always stayed with me:
“In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.”
―Franz Kafka
thematic related playlist (on Spotify here):
Clearest Blue by Chvrches
I Am What You Want Me To Be by The Jungle Giants
I’ll Be Your Mirror by The Velvet Underground
Unfold by Alina Baraz, Galimatias
Everything in its Right Place by Radiohead
Genesis by Grimes
Mirrors by Justin Timberlake
Colouring Outside the Lines by Misterwives
Call It What You Want by Foster the People
Paint Me Silver by Pond
On Track by Tame Impala
People Everywhere (Still Alive) by Khruangbin
has me thinking a lot about who in my life i can unfold around and also who i feel shame around - and what does it say about me? i have lots of pondering to do now, a sign of a good piece of writing ❤️ incred as always
every word here is hitting the spot man