Holding fast to an adopted sense of self is the practice of self-limitation. You cannot be who you are if you are playing the same role(s) day after day for really long stretches of time, especially if those are roles that do not fulfill your needs or satisfy your desires. Self-discovery comes through the willful and considerate transformation of everyday decision making.

Here is your homework. Spend the rest of the day as if you have an entirely different personality and self-conception. Think and feel like your newly adopted persona. Get inside the head and heart of a different person today. Try him or her or them on for size.

Try doing this for six weeks. You may notice how much easier it is to become this new identity as time passes. Notice how you actually learn to create your self-identity by changing the process by which you tell your new self the story about your new self. You will get to know your new self by being attentive to the story you are creating. This is how your identity formed in the first place. The difference being that in childhood, adolescence, and your adult life, you’ve allowed externally generated “stories” to define who you are. This new approach allows you the power to consciously reject what you don’t like and to consciously choose what you do.

How do you determine what you like and dislike without being influenced by the “default” you that exists now? Try to figure out the motivations of a new person over time. Recognize that the impulses you experience are not this new person’s impulses so don’t react as you might have in the past. Slow down to consider the meanings of instincts and feelings. Then you can make a decision as the “new” you and act accordingly.

By working to identify and understand your new self, new goals in life emerge. This “new you” doesn’t have to be a persona that is an “improvement” on you. Making a moral judgment on who you were and who you’re becoming could be an obstacle to transforming yourself. Self-discovery has a greater chance of success if you can withhold such judgments. Try filtering your view through the lens of a dispassionate observer, a person without a stake in the game even though this is your life.

Once you’ve gained traction, consider who you could have become under different circumstances. Also, consider who you have been in certain circumstances. Have you behaved in ways that violate the principles you’ve developed over the course of your life? That consideration can shift your conception of your self as well as your interpretation of those principles and values. Have you been reasonable or unreasonable with yourself and others according to those values? Would you imagine yourself to be more or less forgiving of yourself and others with this new understanding?

We have a malleable plasticity and, thus, identity can be transformed. Is it created within a framework that, in a vacuum, might allow an almost infinite number of possibilities? Possibly, but that’s the reason to explore. Acknowledging that the particularity of circumstances in a life bound in a body within the cross-hairs of time and space limits possibilities and creates the fatality of the present can unleash freedom and creativity.

Will you come to the conclusion that what is in a moment is all that there is in a moment? Will you consider the moments to be more or less meaningful because of their finality? Will you look into your current moment with eyes wider? What else might you decide to explore? What else might you try to experience?

Even if you gave the greatest possible effort over a span of six weeks you wouldn’t lose who you are. The main problem throughout this endeavor will be keeping your current “self” from taking over again and again. You will have to live with uncertainty as you try to figure out how your new self makes decisions. Why do they dance and sing spontaneously in public? Why does she stand in a corner of the living room silently stretching against the wall? Does he paint? Do they sew? Will they make snow forts or build sandcastles? When an attractive person walks by on the street, will your new self smile and make eye contact?

Perhaps there should be cotton candy and gin, streaking and Christmas caroling. Should mudpies be made and lawn darts thrown? Piercings or tattoos? Should you pray for hours every morning and night or earn money stripping? This is you creating you. There are no limits. Try not to be who you have thus far chosen to be. Explore being someone other than who you’ve imagined yourself to be. Someone you haven’t thought yet, a conception of a person you have never encountered.

There could be elements of you so profoundly mundane that you didn’t think being so bland was even possible. Maybe you’ll see what it’s like to live as an extrovert, discovering that the discomfort of being so exposed and vulnerable is liberating. Maybe you’ll discover that the opinions others have about you are worthless. Maybe it’s not the end of the world to be humiliated; you might learn something useful and meaningful about yourself. In the process, you might mature in ways you couldn’t have foreseen. Maybe you’ll develop a passion for participating in life, talking with people you wouldn’t normally talk with.

Bust your ass trying something new. Rebuild a car. Pursue a degree in physics. Plant a garden. Learn a new language. Travel to five different countries in 30 days. Take a backpack and hop on a train. Meet new people. Have at least one long conversation with a new person in each country. Make as many attempts as necessary. Work on your listening skills.

All of this is a suggestion that there’s a possibility that you might be someone other than who you’ve turned out to be thus far. It’s possible you are someone else entirely and you weren’t even aware that you have been living your life on autopilot and being less attentive to the most important moments in your life, the moments you have real decisions to make regarding the direction your life goes.

If you can’t try this now because of your circumstances then consider your circumstances: what sort of choices have you made that have led you to where you are in life, a place where you have so little leeway to try something new that you won’t even let yourself consider the possibility. Now consider what external impediments or obstacles have been in your way and what sort of influences or authorities have guided or coerced you throughout your life and contributed to making you who you are now. Examine the political and economic structures in your community, your state, and your country. Then consider what you really need or want in life and how feasible it is or is not to fulfill those needs or desires within the structure of the system that funnels you through life.

What would have to change externally for you to achieve what you want to achieve? How would the political, legal, economic, and social structures have to change to allow these possibilities? Is there another community or country that might be a better fit for the new you? What would your new you do once you make these assessments? Think again of your new decision-making process, the criteria you consider important, the feelings you want to create, the experiences you want to have.

The creation of the whole piece by piece, moment by moment, it is life. Why are we here if not to try out the things we wonder about? Notice how much you have to think to really be able to identify how you tend to think over the course of most days. Think about the shifts and patterns that come and go, how you move your body through space in the cold of winter or the heat of summer, how that affects your mood and your thinking. Do you experience a lot of sunlight or a little? Do you spend your days or evenings in museums, libraries, concert halls, pubs, the living room, with a lover or alone?

I have given you an assignment. By doing so, I have fulfilled my duty.