The Self That Isn't There

Rethinking what it means to be you

When I lived in the States, the retreat centres near me were always offering the same promise in one form or another: come and peel back the layers — the conditioning, the performance, the inherited expectations — and underneath you’ll finally find it. The real you. The genuine, original self that’s been there all along.

That’s one kind of peeling: done in a circle of chairs, with a facilitator and a box of tissues, working inward from the outside of a person toward some imagined core.

For the last century or two we’ve been telling ourselves a version of that same story: that beneath our relationships, experiences, and formation sits a pristine individual waiting to be uncovered. Strip away everything added later and something essential remains.

There’s another kind of peeling, though — the sort you do at a kitchen sink with a knife (perhaps with a box of tissues still at hand). Picture an onion on a chopping board. Peel it, layer by papery layer, and you don’t eventually uncover some harder thing hidden at the centre. You arrive at nothing beyond the layers themselves. Not a hidden self beneath it all — just more onion.

Maybe there’s no untouched centre waiting there at all. Maybe relationship — with people, with places, with God — goes all the way down. Peel as far as you like; what you’ve been stripping away isn’t disguising the person. It’s part of what made the person in the first place.

A Bodily Communion

Start with the body — the one thing in this world that’s surely, unambiguously mine.

Except it isn’t, not in the way most of us assume. Your body isn’t a neatly bounded thing. It’s composed through a dizzying web of relationships. Something like thirty-eight trillion microbial cells live alongside your own thirty trillion — not stowaways or guests, but participants in the composition of your body, helping build your immune system, regulate your digestion, and tune your mood before you’ve even had your coffee. Biologists call this a holobiont: a community held together as one thing, the way soil seems like one thing until you look closely and discover a living weave of fungi, bacteria, insects, and an endless unseen exchange.

Go smaller still and the mitochondria powering every cell in your body were once free-living bacteria, absorbed by some ancestral cell so long ago that we’ve stopped thinking of them as another lifeform at all. They’ve become so thoroughly part of the arrangement that it’s hard to say where host ends and resident begins.

You resemble the floor of a forest far more than a machine — humus that got up and started walking, Adam’s children in the oldest sense: formed from the ground, animated by a borrowed breath.

So the immune system turns out to be something that’s less a border guard than a ceaseless work of coordination, sorting and sustaining the relationships that make a body a body. It doesn’t defend a protected self; it holds open the conditions in which a body can keep being made — participation, rather than protection. We’re physically porous — open to the world more than fortified against it. And that porosity isn’t a flaw in our design. It is the design.

An Inner Communion

Our minds are no different. The voice you hear thinking — that most private, most interior thing — didn’t emerge in isolation. It began in other people’s voices, heard before you could understand them, absorbed before you had any say in the matter, and only gradually settling into something that feels like your own. We don’t invent the inner voice. We inherit it — the way we inherit a first language: taken in so early and so completely that it becomes difficult to tell where what you received ends and what you call yourself begins.

And that language isn’t simply an accessory to the self. Wilhelm von Humboldt saw this two centuries ago: language is the medium in which a world becomes thinkable. It’s the air of intelligibility you find yourself breathing before you’re old enough to notice you are breathing anything at all — formed by people you’ll never meet, carrying their distinctions, their emphases, their blind spots.

After enough time inside it, the boundary between what you use and what you are begins to blur. Language isn’t merely something you think with, as though it were only a tool. It’s the world in which thinking happens at all — so thoroughly present that it becomes difficult to say where language ends and thought begins.

Then there’s the story you’re in. A tree’s rings aren’t laid on top of the tree as a record of its life. They are the tree — each year’s growth shaped by everything that came before and becoming the shape later growth has to follow. The stories handed to you work much the same way. Long before you could question them, you absorbed what counts as a happy ending, what a wasted life looks like, what home means — from family sayings, from griefs that marked the people around you, from the habits and assumptions of those who raised you. By the time you were old enough to notice these stories, they had already become rings in the grain of the wood.

And place, too. Bone keeps a record. The calcium in your skeleton and the isotopes laid down in your teeth carry the chemical signature of the water and soil that fed you as a child. That isn’t a metaphor. The ground you grew up on became, quite literally, part of what you’re made of. The rest of a place works similarly — its weather, its light, the sounds you’ve stopped consciously hearing. None of it stays outside as scenery for a self going about its business elsewhere. It enters the grain of perception itself. Place isn’t a backdrop to the self. It’s part of what the self is made of.

And time. A bell strikes somewhere, and the sound reaches you a beat after it was rung — so what you hear as “now” is already slightly out of date. Augustine noticed something similar in the mind itself: past, present, and future aren’t separate rooms you move through in sequence, but three ways the soul holds itself together at once — remembering, attending, anticipating.

You aren’t located in the present the way an object sits on a shelf. You’re stretched across time, gathered across what has been, what is, and what is not yet — each shaped by the voices, language, and stories that have already become part of you.

So: a porous body, a porous mind, living inside a language you didn’t invent, inside a story you didn’t compose, formed by a place and a time you didn’t choose, carrying the dead forward into a future you can’t yet see. Looking for the part of you that owes nothing to anything outside itself is a fool’s errand.

The Word-Formed You

If all of this is true, then you’re faced with two choices, and a great deal rides on which one you take.

The first says: well, then there’s nothing there. Performances all the way down — the onion with no centre — and we should stop pretending otherwise and give ourselves over to nihilism. There’s a lot of truth in this. The sovereign, self-made individual modernity sold us was always a fiction, and not a harmless one. But the insight curdles if it stops there. It mistakes the absence of one kind of self for the absence of selfhood as such. The fact that you didn’t make yourself doesn’t mean there’s no you. It means you’re a different kind of thing than you may have assumed.

The second reading begins elsewhere — not with subtraction, but with intelligibility already given. In his Confessions, Augustine turns inward in search of something solid enough to stand on. But as he moves through memory, desire, and attention, he doesn’t find a final inner chamber where the self becomes self-contained. Instead, he finds something prior to himself already there — not emptiness at the centre, but Presence already shaping the very movement of his search. This is what he names in the striking line: Tu autem eras interior intimo meo — “You were more inward to me than my innermost self.”

The reality towards which Augustine is groping is made explicit in the opening of John’s Gospel. “In the beginning was the Word” — and the Word, Logos, isn’t an abstract principle, but Christ himself: the one through whom all things are made. Meaning isn’t added later to a world that was originally self-contained. Reality itself is already constituted in and through the Word: from the beginning, it is Word-formed — ordered as intelligibility, relation, and responsiveness.

In other words, things aren’t first isolated units that later enter into relationship. Relation is their very mode of being. To exist at all is already to exist within a field of connection and address, where what something is can’t be separated from how it stands in relation to what is not itself — and where the line between the two is always hazy and porous.

On that account, what you keep encountering — in body, mind, language, story, place, and time — isn’t accidental dependence or structural weakness. It’s the signature of a world that’s already Word-formed, already constituted as response to the Word, and therefore relational at every level you can find. To exist isn’t simply to be affected by relations. It’s to stand, from the first, within a field of meaning that precedes you and makes you intelligible at all.

This suggests to me that existence is also inherently liturgical. If everything that exists is already constituted in and through relation — body as world-formed, mind as language-formed, memory as time-formed, self as other-formed, — and if these are themselves grounded in the Word through whom all things are made, then liturgy is what that whole pattern looks like when it becomes visible and deliberate in a single life.

It’s not only response, but participation: the gathering of speech, silence, gesture, attention, and time into a shared form that corresponds to the way reality already is. Human life becomes, in concentrated form, what it has always been — not self-originating, but a gift received, held, and made intelligible by the Word.

Seen like this, liturgy isn’t something we perform in church, nor a religious overlay added to our ordinary lives. It’s its clarified form: ordinary life, finally seen for what it is, consciously enacted as participation in the One who already and always holds it — and us within it — together.

Which is why the movement we’ve been tracing — from body to mind to language to story to place to time — doesn’t end in emptiness but in participation. There is no self waiting beneath the relations, like a hull beneath barnacles that need to be scraped away. The self isn’t found apart from others but in and through them. We don’t begin in isolation but in communion — not as something we arrive at after a long search, but as the condition of our being. Not something we enter, but something we inherently are.