false selves

"It was an alarming thought that these false selves should still have me in their power, and in my bewilderment I began wondering whether any such thing as my real self could be said to exist at all. Like a sudden revelation, then, it became clear to me that the self was always changing, always developing, only capable of evolving fully through the integration of all past semblances. I wouldn’t be my true self till I accepted and learned to know all those selves I’d disowned and deserted...As if this were something I could do consciously, there and then, the last of my inertia vanished, consumed by an ardent desire for identification with the essential ‘I’ – until this had been achieved I’d always be as I was now, wandering like a stranger, lost, frightened and confused, among the changes and contradictions of my own personality."

 --Anna Kavan, Guilty