On Finding Yourself

Sunset on Jimbaran Beach.

I have been in Indonesia for a month, staying and teaching English on the island of Bali which in contemporary culture is cognate with soul-searchers, dreamers, influencers. The kind that wears either paisley-patterned drapes, Lululemon two-pieces, or that simpers around in board shorts, biking from yoga to the beach to Pilates to the gym all while dowsing themselves in incense, sipping a coconut, carrying with them a surfboard or maybe even a ring light.

It’s safe to say that Bali wasn’t on my list of dream places to visit, but circumstance threw up an opportunity to come at a time when I was presented with profound uncertainty about my direction in life. It seemed like the only logical path to take. I don’t regret it and am enjoying my time here even if it has been punctuated somewhat by false starts and unexpected events which have changed the nature of the trip. Before coming, there were naturally jokes with family and friends about ‘finding myself’ here, and, a month in, I feel this prospect is neither really possible nor desirable.

I’ve been thinking about that phrase over the past few days, especially after having attended, quite spontaneously, a breathwork and meditation workshop. The event was long, intense, guided by an instructor called Manesh in a spa complex of exposed concrete and thin swimming pools which felt somewhat at odds with the by comparison more humble endeavours, trials even, that we were occupying ourselves with in the yoga studio with no AC. Clearing the mind. Being present. Noticing the sweat dripping down the forehead, the upper arm direct from the source.

People arrived in dribs and drabs throughout the event. You would close your eyes and new faces, new bodies, would appear. At one point, Manesh asked us to close our eyes while he recited the poem ‘On Marriage’ by Kahil Gibran. It finishes with the exhortation to:

stand together yet not too near together:

For the pillars of the temple stand apart,

And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

After he finished, Manesh asked us to speak to the person nearest to us about what the poem meant for us and how it resonated with our own relationships. Having just come out of my first long-term relationship, the poem seemed to talk quite directly to my situation.

I turned: the nearest person to me was a new arrival who had missed the poem and didn’t know what we were supposed to be doing. He was buff, well-groomed, wore black shorts and, to my mind, somewhat strangely given the nature of the event, a leather harness. He also had a sleeve of tattoos. I cannot recall the exact images save for a few words needled into his hand, one of them being ‘Balance’.

I did my best to explain what we were to discuss. He interrupted: ‘I’m sorry, where are you from? I’m half Spanish, half German and I have lived in Italy for many years and I have many friends in England and the UK and you are extremely difficult to understand. You have an extremely strong accent.’ Somewhat taken aback, I tried to speak more slowly, more clearly. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I can only really approach this from my own experience. I am a mental coach and…’, he went on. I thought, instinctively: well, yes, you’d have to be mental to want you as a coach.

During the workshop, I found myself caught between making judgements like this and wanting to be generous, to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. I looked around. There was a man wearing toe-separator socks who looked like a tech startup CEO trying to ‘put in the work’; later, a man arrived wearing a fedora. (Earlier that morning, I had also encountered an older woman, white, a silver bindi stuck between her eyebrows, frustrated by a seat in a cafe that had been adapted into a rocking chair. She sat down in a huff of drapes, looked through the menu, asked whether there were any smoothie bowls, then whether there was anything gluten free only to leave when learning the answer was no. Later, I walked past her again smoking a cigarette.) This quite clearly wasn’t my crowd.

Lauren Berlant in On the Inconvenience of Other People schematises what they call the ‘inconvenience drive’, our internal radon detector which measures how annoyed, frustrated and, indeed, inconvenienced we are by other people. The book opens with a zinger: ‘Hell is other people. If you are lucky.’ I was thinking about Berlant after the meditation event and how this island, Bali, seemingly attracts people who have been so inconvenienced by others, not to mention themselves, that they feel the need to rediscover who they are.

Finding yourself, after all, implies that you are lost and, not content with being lost, need to be found. Believing yourself undeserving of being lost, this project of self-discovery comes to be felt with a sense of urgency; for it is only by being found that you might be able to start making sense to yourself again and to others as something legible, discernible.

Is it any wonder, then, that many of those on this journey of self-discovery, having embarked on this quest to find themselves, end up ultimately conforming to type? To wearing the same kinds of clothes, to inscribing on their bodies images, words, which sit somewhere vaguely between decoration and order?

The question of finding yourself, it seems to me, might actually be a question of: how do I, how can I, fit in here? What adjustments am I wanting, perhaps willing, to make so that I might be more locatable to myself and, most importantly, to others?

This means that the question of finding oneself is a question of visibility which, in actual fact, more often than not, results in less the specific drawing out of an identity, a plotting of coordinates in the form of a tattoo on the hand, than a sort of trade-off between something borrowed—a repertoire of tattoos, say—and something new: the tattoo itself.

What I mean is that the result of finding oneself is ultimately another act of self-loss as individuality gets capitulated to group work, as those who have found themselves start to look disconcertingly like one another while they each claim a kind of enviable mental clarity or at least enough of it that they can be considered capable of coaching others.

Not, mind, that there is anything wrong with refining our group dynamics, our group choreographies. But when these are interrupted or directed by the comparatively more showboating acts of self-discovery, what happens is that the individual’s quest comes to seem the most important of endeavours rather than the effort of realising how we might figure out a better way of discovering each other despite our inconveniences to one another.

This lonely quest ultimately prevents us from realising what it was about our relationships with each other that might have necessitated our own individual feelings that we required finding in the first place, that brought about the feeling of being lost. A quest that somehow seems more important than a different kind of journey, to use that most overused of words, which might help us locate each other and how we can work to balance each other rather than pretend we have the power to balance anyone, including ourselves, alone.

The narcissistic project I have somewhat overzealously projected onto the leather-harness-wearing mental coach is, to my mind, a more vexed question about our desires, thoroughly nurtured by a culture of image and individual, to stand aside from each other while being unable to forgo fully the desperate need we have for each other.

If finding yourself demands the needling efforts to distinguish myself from other people as more enlightened, less mental, then I am content, for the time being, to stay lost.

PS. To keep it real: just before posting this, in a moment of pure clumsiness, I managed to spill more or less a full matcha latte all over myself. Maybe I should contact that mental coach and work on my balance after all.