Introspection and a bit more on "the uncarved block"

For those who haven't read the first few posts I made, I'm going to include a quick excerpt from my very first post on why I named my blog "the Uncarved Block."

"In this last week, I've been reading and re reading blog after blog. I don't know what I believe any more. I don't know who I am or what I want from life. I've titled this blog 'the uncarved block.' I want to use this blog as a journey to think through my life and my views and to discover my authentic self. I love Daoism. In Daoism, the uncarved block represents the concept of nature before the imprint of culture, or, as I'm using it here, the authentic or true self. I want to rediscover and become the uncarved block-- my true and authentic self. I feel like right now I'm fragmented. There's the part of me that believes deeply in Mormonism and wants to get married to a woman and have a family. There's the part of me that believes strongly in Christ, and would be comfortable remaining Christian and abandoning Mormonism. There's the part of me that is extremely attracted to men. Part of me hates that, and the other embraces it. And then there's the part of me that's a Daoist, and just wants to enjoy the beauties of the present moment. I hope that in writing, I can find a synthesis. I want to overcome this fragmentation, and discover what I really, truly believe."




I spent a few hours tonight introspecting deeply. It began with a very humbling conversation with a friend. It was the kind of feeling where you finally grasp something so much bigger than yourself that has somehow been evading you. We talked about some mistakes I'd made and some things I did wrong. I didn't feel very guilty- justvery humbled. I just really felt the depth of my weakness. After talking to her, I sat in the library and just thought for quite awhile. Almost over an hour, I think. I thought deeply about my early childhood and tried to remember as much as possible about the transition periods in my early life- like moving to and from St.George, depression in fourth grade, going to and from Harold B Lee elementary,etc. I remembered quite a few things that I hadn't thought about in years,and some of them perhaps even since they happened. And I learned quite a bit.For a long time I've regretted the fact that  I don't have a written record of most of my earlier childhood because I feel like in order to understand where I am, who I am, who I want  to become, and where I'm going, I need to understand those early formative years and the influences that shaped me and the reasons I thought the way I thought and made the choices I did. But I've often worried that I actively change my memories and look at things differently than they actually happened. I realized tonight that it doesn't matter if my memories are only distorted fragments because they can still be revelatory in the mere fact that I remember them. What I remember says a great deal about who I was and am. Only those things that impacted me emotionally will have survived in my mind, and so through analyzing them, I can begin to piece together who I was at different points in time through the knowledge of what things were important to me.I also realized that the narrative is the function by which self is understood, and so I can understand quite a bit about  I am at any given point in time by looking at the narrative I believed about myself, with no judgment as to the a actually veracity of the narrative. For example, my narrative about my feelings for certain girls has  often changed from being genuine feelings that offer hope to being an emotional crutch to avoid dealing with the pain of possibly being gay.I think that the narrative that I make for myself is most often more important than the reality of what has actually happened in the past because it informs my action  and attitudes to a greater degree. Didmy feelings for a girl occur naturally or did I force them? At this point I honestly have no idea, but I can tell a lot by the narrative I make for myself about it.This also teaches me something deeper about humanity in general. We find our identity in the narratives we create for ourselves. Changes in behavior or feelings are often impossible without a change in the narrative (but definitely not always. I'm by no means asserting you can stop being gay by changing the narrative you view yourself).A consistent narrative I found in myself was the narrative of being different. From an early age I began to believe that there was something very different about me that genuinely separated me from other people. Was my subsequent separation the result of actually being different, or just of the narrative I formed around my perception of self? And after that, didn't separation just create a self confirming bias?Understanding this concept of narrative as the root of identity could be life changing if you open up to new narratives and new ways of understanding your past. For example, if I stop finding my identity in the boy who was different, perhaps it wouldn't bother me so much when I come upon differences I view as irreconcilable in my relationships with other people.And maybe the true path to autonomy and happiness isn't in the reinterpretation of identity narratives or in forming new ones, but in simply recognizing narratives for what they are and moving beyond them. I can move beyond the narrative of the boy who was different. I can think outside of the narrative of the boy who was always fat and unattractive. I can move into a new territory of the life without narrative- living as the uncarved block.