The Exhausting Project of Being Someone

9 min read

There’s a project most people are running in the background of their lives, and it’s so constant they don’t even notice it anymore: the project of being someone. Not becoming someone — being someone. Maintaining a coherent, stable, defensible version of themselves that holds up across moods, relationships, and the passage of time. It’s exhausting work, and most of the suffering people bring into psychotherapy is tangled up in it.

A central concept in Buddhism is that attachment to an earthly self, what one might call ego, is a primary source of pain and suffering – within ourselves to one another. The most elegantly straightforward discussion of this concept that I’ve heard came from Tempel Smith, a meditation teacher at Spirit Rock in California. He talked about the experience of selfing — the mind’s relentless effort to construct and reconstruct a narrative identity that makes sense. What stuck with me all these years later wasn’t just the Buddhist framing, though that’s where he was coming from. It was how precisely his description maps onto what I see in the therapy room every week. If I send my clients one thing to read or listen to, it’s this.

The Exhausting Work of Self-Construction

Smith describes something most of us recognize if we’re honest: the mind, left to its own devices, spends an enormous amount of time retelling our story to ourselves. Not because the story is interesting, but because it keeps falling apart. You get sad, and suddenly you have access to all your sad memories — “I’ve always been this way, I always will be.” The narrative feels absolutely true. Then the sadness passes and you’re in a good mood, and now you have access to the happy memories, and the whole story gets rewritten. You’ve always been fundamentally okay. The earlier sadness was an aberration.

Back and forth, mood by mood, day by day. The mind tries to project who you are right now into the future, to settle the complexity of what’s coming. And it keeps rummaging through the past trying to sort it out. But because the current state keeps changing, the narrative has to be constantly revised.

This is what I see in individual therapy all the time. Someone comes in with what sounds like a specific problem — anxiety, relationship conflict, a pattern they can’t break — but underneath it there’s this deeper, more exhausting labor: the effort to be a coherent self. To know, once and for all, who they are. And the terror that if they stop working at it, everything will fall apart.

Why Insults Land So Hard

Smith makes a point that I think is underappreciated in psychology: if your relationship to your own sense of self is shaky — and everyone’s is, because the self is not a fixed thing — then any challenge to that self feels like an existential threat. Someone criticizes you and it doesn’t just sting. It sends you on a soul search. You have to defend the version of yourself they just attacked. But there isn’t actually a stable self to defend. There’s just the current version, which is already in the process of changing.

This is where couples work gets interesting. In Emotionally Focused Therapy, we see this dynamic play out between partners constantly. One person says something critical — maybe not even intentionally — and the other’s self-narrative is suddenly under siege. The withdrawal, the counterattack, the desperate bid for reassurance: these aren’t just communication problems. They’re attachment responses to a perceived threat to the self. The pursuer is essentially saying, “Tell me I’m okay. Mirror back the version of me I need to believe in.” And the withdrawer is saying, “I can’t handle the implication that I’m failing at being who I’m supposed to be.”

Both are caught in the same trap: trying to use the relationship to stabilize something that can’t be stabilized.

The River, Not the Billiard Ball

Smith uses a metaphor I find genuinely useful: the self is more like a river than a billiard ball. There are real patterns — the riverbank shapes the flow, the water tends to go in familiar directions. You don’t look completely different day to day. But the river is always moving. The riverbank itself is changed by how the water flows through it. And trying to freeze the river — to finally get one stable, permanent version of yourself — is not just impossible. It’s the source of a tremendous amount of suffering.

This is fundamentally a psychodynamic insight, even though Smith is coming from a Buddhist contemplative tradition. Psychodynamic therapy has always been interested in the ways we construct and defend a sense of self — what Winnicott called the “false self,” what contemporary relational analysts describe as the ongoing negotiation of self-experience within relationships. The patterns are real. The defenses are meaningful. But the self they’re protecting is not the solid thing we imagine it to be.

In my work with men in particular, I see how much energy goes into maintaining a self-image that was never fully chosen. The stoic one. The provider. The one who doesn’t need help. These aren’t just roles — they’re identities that have been congealed, to use Smith’s word, under pressure. And the congealing is the problem, not the patterns themselves. The patterns contain real information about who someone has been and what they’ve survived. But when they harden into “this is who I am, period,” they become a prison.

What Happens When You Stop Defending the Narrative

Something Smith says that I think has direct clinical relevance: when the sense of self thins out — when you stop working so hard to maintain the narrative — there’s often a surprising amount of well-being. Not euphoria. Just a quieter, more spacious way of being present. The food tastes better. The anxiety that seemed to be about something specific turns out to have been about the effort of self-maintenance all along.

I see this in therapy when it’s going well. There’s a moment — sometimes gradual, sometimes sudden — where a person stops trying to convince me (and themselves) of who they are, and just… arrives. The defenses relax. The story they’ve been telling about themselves loosens its grip. And what comes forward is not chaos, not emptiness, but something more alive and specific than the narrative ever was.

In mindfulness terms, this is the difference between experiencing and narrating. In psychodynamic terms, it’s the difference between being in the room and performing in the room. In EFT terms, it’s what happens when someone drops below the reactive cycle and touches the raw, undefended feeling underneath.

The Rainbow Behind the Hill

Smith tells a story about walking with a colleague after a rainstorm and seeing a vivid rainbow. The colleague said, “If we didn’t have to go teach, we could walk to the base of it.” Smith — trained as a physicist before becoming a meditation teacher — laughed, then felt awkward about it. Because the rainbow is real. There really is one there. But it’s not a thing you can walk to. It’s billions of water droplets refracting sunlight. The perception is genuine. The solidity is not.

He makes the point that believing rainbows are solid objects with pots of gold doesn’t cause much suffering. But believing the self is a solid object — something you can finally locate, define, and defend — causes an enormous amount of it. We’re perceiving something real when we perceive a self. We’re just wrong about what kind of thing it is.

This matters clinically because so many people come into therapy with a version of the same request: “Help me figure out who I really am.” And the honest answer is that “who you really are” is not a destination you arrive at. It’s a process you learn to inhabit. The river keeps flowing. The question isn’t who are you — it’s how are you relating to the flow.

The Therapy of Loosening

What I do in my work — drawing on psychodynamic psychotherapy, Emotionally Focused Therapy for couples, and contemplative practice — is help people develop a different relationship to their own self-experience. Not to demolish the self, which would be terrifying and isn’t the point. But to loosen it. To notice when the congealing is happening, what it’s responding to, and what it costs.

When someone is caught in compulsive behavior — sexual or otherwise — there’s almost always a self-project underneath it. The behavior is trying to manage an unbearable version of the self, or to access a version that feels more tolerable. When a couple is locked in a destructive cycle, they’re usually fighting about whose version of the self gets validated. When a man can’t figure out why he’s angry all the time, it’s often because the self he’s been maintaining requires an enormous amount of suppression to hold together.

The work isn’t to build a better self. It’s to need less of one.

So What Does This Mean for You?

If you recognize yourself in any of this — the exhaustion of keeping your story straight, the way certain criticisms send you into a spiral, the nagging sense that you should have figured yourself out by now — you’re not broken. You’re doing what every mind does. The question is whether you want to keep doing it on autopilot, or whether you want to understand the machinery well enough to relax it.

That’s the work I do. And if something in this post caught your attention — if you recognized the river, or the project, or the exhaustion — it might be worth a conversation.

You might also find these relevant:

• Why Google Always Tells You to Try CBT — When therapy becomes technique rather than relationship.
• Why Knowing Your Brain Isn’t the Same as Knowing Yourself — The neuroscience version of the same trap: externalization disguised as insight.
• Buddhist Psychology — The contemplative tradition behind much of what’s discussed in this post.

About the Author

Jonah Taylor, LCSW, CST is a psychodynamic therapist and AASECT Certified Sex Therapist in Pittsburgh. He specializes in Emotionally Focused Therapy for couples, sex therapy, problematic sexual behavior, and men’s psychology — bringing analytic rigor to the deep patterns that shape how people relate, desire, and get stuck. Book a free consultation.