You Will Suffer Terribly if You Don't Take Active Participation in Your Self-Creation

Anxiety could be your guide to becoming who you truly are (supposed to be)

by Myriam Tillson

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“This is the essence of neurosis—the person’s unused potentialities…”
-Rollo May (Man’s Search for Himself)

You are not a whole individual. And if you don’t try to become one, you might go insane.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a whole individual, either. I’m writing this from the position of a fellow explorer of human existence, not a wise sage waiting for you at the top of the mountain.

And, of course, I don’t know every single one of you reading this, so I gave myself quite a bit of freedom with the opening statement. But becoming an individual is a more difficult task than we tend to acknowledge, and there is no shame in still being on the journey. In fact, most people aren’t even aware it’s a task.

“Everything good is costly, and the development of personality is one of the most costly of all things.”
(Encounters With The Soul, Barbara Hannah quoting Carl Jung)

The acorn becomes an oak without any decision or commitment. Favorable conditions, that is, Mother Nature’s blessing, is all that it needs for growth. Similarly, the kitten becomes a cat and the puppy a dog based on instinct.

However, a man or a woman becomes a whole individual only by his or her decisions and the commitment and action that follow those decisions.

And the most important decision of all, which we are asked to make every day, is to step into our highest possibilities. By this, we don’t mean that everyone should decide and strive to become a billionaire entrepreneur or whatever the sad, unimaginative, materialistic fantasy of the month is. We mean stepping into your unique highest possibilities - making the choices that are necessary for you to become what you and ONLY YOU are supposed to be.

This is why, potential isn’t something reserved only for the gifted and exceptionally talented. Potential is something that lies in every single one of us and is crying out to be used.

As Abraham Maslow noted, capacities are also needs. It’s not just that it feels good to use and explore your potential - it’s vital for your psychological and spiritual health. Expressing the same sentiment as his fellow existential-humanist Rollo May in the opening quote, he believed that an unused capacity or potential can become “a disease center.”

And I know what most of you are thinking.

”But I don’t know what my potential is.”

Well, neither do I. But I have an interesting idea about how to determine the direction you will take to start exploring your potential.

If we continue following the existentialist line of thought, we notice that something stands between your potential and it becoming an actualized reality.

“Possibility means I can. In a logical system, it is convenient enough to say that possibility passes over into actuality. In reality it is not so easy, and an intermediate determinant is necessary. This intermediate determinant is anxiety.”
-Soren Kierkegaard (The Concept of Dread)

Although the word “anxiety” is used in so many different ways today that it’s slowly losing its meaning, the first thinker to ever directly write about it, Kierkegaard, thought of it as a kind of discomfort that you must go through to fully engage in life. It’s the ticket for embarking on the journey of becoming who you are.

Kierkegaard’s type of anxiety would be the “normal” anxiety that’s an integral part of human existence. On the other hand, the type of anxiety Maslow and May warned us we’ll experience if we fail to use our potential is “neurotic anxiety.” However, both Maslow and May acknowledged that neurotic anxiety can be used as a wake-up call and lead to the same life-engagement that normal anxiety does; it’s only (far) more uncomfortable.

How can all of this help you find your potential?

Well, a couple of things are certain:

-Choosing a path that produces no inner discomfort won’t bring you any closer to who you’re supposed to become.

-Anxiety stands between you and the possibility that you should actualize.

-Not all possibilities are equal. I experience anxiety at the thought of going skydiving, but I’ve also experienced anxiety at the thought of sharing my writing with strangers or becoming an actor. So far, I’ve been choosing to write, and it seems there’s some potential there.

What is an anxiety-inducing and constructive path that you can choose and commit to for long enough to receive feedback from life? Maybe the scariest one? As Joseph Campbell said, you should enter the forest at the darkest point.

If you hoped for a 5-step plan to discover your unique purpose and know exactly what to do with your life, you’re not taking the question of your existence seriously enough.

You are the only one who can trace the unique map of your soul. Myself and anyone else can only help you embark on your journey and take some initial tools with you. That’s all.

"We must live out our own vision of life... If you avoid error you do not live; in a sense even it may be said that every life is a mistake, for no one has found the truth.”
-Carl Jung

Thank you for reading.

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