Everything has a justification.
When you do something, it’s for a reason. You tell yourself that you cut your hair because it’s getting in the way. You buy a new shirt because the old one has holes and you need to replace it. Dinner happens because you’re hungry.
This might sound obvious; of course your actions have reasons behind them. Why would anyone do anything otherwise? Life is one long chain of cause and effect, each event sparking the next until we have nothing left to do but die. It’s a lovely story. It has clear motives, connections, logic connecting it all together into a coherent narrative. Any loose threads can be woven back into the chain easily enough if you can figure out why they happened. Everything seems so simple.
There’s an experiment called the Split-Brain Experiment where people who had their brain’s halves disconnected (usually to treat something like severe epilepsy) were tested on a few different things. It’s often used as proof of “oh, the left brain does this and the right brain does that”, or sometimes as justification for consciousness being weirder than anyone thought it was. One part of the experiment has stuck with me ever since I first read about it: the left-brain interpreter. The participant’s right brain was shown something. Their left hand was able to point at it. When asked why they pointed at it, the participants came up with entirely different answers from “because this is the object you showed me”. They were unaware that anything else had prompted that action.
Our stories about ourselves might not be as accurate as we think they are. I know that my own justifications for an action can be very different from the real reasons behind it. I can’t count the times I’ve done something out of fear and justified it as something more acceptable, only to later realize that it was fear all along. It’s all too easy to rationalize things so that they make sense in the larger story I’m part of- so easy that I miss the unconscious motivations behind them. I doubt I’m alone in this. Language lends itself to stories, and stories are easy to get trapped in.
While it’s easy to tell a story about yourself, your story isn’t who you are. Everything about your story can be changed. Even if it becomes unrecognizable, you’ll still be there. You’re the narrator, not the plot. More importantly, you get to decide how to direct that plot. You’re an ongoing act of creation, and you’re the one with the paint. The rest is up to you.