The deep secrecy of my own being is often hidden from me by my own estimate of what I am.
My idea of what I am is falsified by my admiration for what I do.
And my illusions about myself are bred by contagion from the illusions of other men.
We all seek to imitate one another’s imagined greatness.
If I do not know who I am, it is because
I think I am the sort of person everyone around me wants to be.
Perhaps I have never asked myself whether I really wanted to become
what everybody else seems to want to become.
Perhaps if I only realized that I do not admire what everyone seems to admire,
I would really begin to live after all.
I would be liberated from the painful duty of saying what I really do not think
and of acting in a way that betrays God’s truth and the integrity of my own soul.
~ Thomas Merton
from No Man is an Island
