If you asked me to describe myself, I’d probably tell you that I am energetic to the point of perpetual hyperactivity, sensitive, curious, independent, silly, tenacious, loyal, loving, and very strong — both physically and emotionally.
I could also share a list of labels, titles, and accomplishments such as dog mum, wife, nature-lover, health coach, IFBB pro, artist, and many others, that would give you a good sense about who I am in this world.
I know that I am not defined fully by my labels as much as I know that I actively chose and pursued many of them, but my character traits feel different. They feel like they are a part of me, intrinsic and infallible.
But even still, I sometimes question what is truly my own or what I had to develop in the face of my circumstances just to survive.
It gets more ambiguous when I look at my desires — those things that I want, the sea-side home, the dog-rescue farm, the coaching community, the Porsche 911— where did those desires come from and how much of them came from me?
Surely I didn’t know a Porsche existed until I saw someone else driving it, so how much of what I think I want do I actually want, and is this why I can do, be, see, have, and achieve remarkable things but still feel unsatisfied?
It’s easy enough to examine my desires, even my ambitions and some of my ideas about success with this healthy skepticism, but some of my darker thoughts, like my fears or my personal beliefs and coping strategies, are harder to shake loose.
On paper, I can neatly point back to the root cause for most, if not all, of my limitations; but understanding and untethering are very different actions, especially in the conviction of my body, so automatic in my patterns that they truly feel like ‘mine’.
And yet, if I can choose to examine my thoughts, words, and actions, then I can choose to change them, as I have many times. But if I am the one making the choices, why did I choose all this, good and bad? And how much of me did I actually choose?
Did I make myself like this, or was I made this way?
The more I think about it, the more variable everything feels, but one trait that stands sturdy in the chaotic internal storm I just started is that I am strong.
I know I am strong because I can validate it in various ways in the real world. There is tangible proof of my strength woven through who I am that holds up with repeatable, testable, irrefutable evidence in who I am today, who I was yesterday, and who I plan on being tomorrow.
Being strong feels like ‘me’ because it is the one thing I go into myself for and trust that I can apply to any situation, whether is calls for physical strength, emotional strength, relational strength, spiritual strength or otherwise.
Whatever the world asks of me, I answer with strength.
But was I born strong? Did I arrive with the temperament and capacity to be this strong raring to go? Or did I become strong by means of adaptation, conditioning, or some combination of the two?
I want to believe I burst out of the womb as a mini female Hercules, but the more truthfully I look, the more I am reminded that I was a very sick and feeble baby.
I struggled to breathe, spending substantial time in oxygen tents at the IUC. I grew up with asthma and severe allergies where probably masked some developmental delays by hitting puberty very young, only to struggle with a tumor in my lung and spine as a teenager, and hit with severe mental health issues in early adulthood.
I remember feeling isolated from other children while being called ‘mature’ by adults because I never seemed interested in the whimsical fantasies of childhood. Instead, I felt possessed by the wisdom of adult life with all its grim and complex realities that seized me far too young.
I was not strong at all, but I projected strength through resilience. In fact, I only became physically strong as a means to reclaim my sense of personal agency in both my mind and body — yes, becoming strong was a choice, my choice. Or was it a necessary response to a chaotic world?
But if becoming strong was “my choice,” who was the version of me making that choice, and what had already happened to her before she made it?
My mum was strong, the people around me in my life were strong, so somewhere along the way, I must have decided that strength, specifically – not delicacy, surrender, avoidance, softness, etc — was what I wanted to be. Or is it what I needed to be?
I vividly recall being in the hospital Sick Kids ward with a bunk mate who was also recovering from major surgery. She was very good at playing the role of a sick kid. I was only 14 but I remember keenly observing her behavior and concluding that the more she played into that identity, the more it got her needs met. From that singular interpretation at 14 rose part of the causal architecture of my adult self. That day, I made a quiet internal promise to myself that before I left the hospital, I would never play the role of a victim. I made my commitment to become strong.
But did I choose strength because I thought it was valuable and admirable, or did I choose strength because it felt necessary, safe, or even required of me?
I honestly do not know. And I don’t think the answer is as clean as I would like it to be.
I imagine myself as a twin, born into an identical biological reality, in the same circumstances, at the exact same time with the very same experiences —would she have chosen the same? What reason might she have to choose differently? What if she chose to be soft? What if she chose to be like my bunk mate, instead? Do I really believe that choice is available to her? Was it available to me?
Here, I circle back to the beginning territory where my strength is my own internal mechanism, except now I know that it’s not. So who made that choice to become strong? For surely I did, and yet in so many ways, and at so many touch points, it really felt that there was no other choice for me, that the world chose for me.
But the world didn’t choose anything.
I chose. But I did not choose the person who made the choice.
She was shaped, influenced, encouraged, led, scolded, taught, praised, shown, complimented, criticized, excluded, rewarded for her choices. And that shaped how she chose. Do I really believe she could have chosen differently?
Well, that’s free will: the belief that if you were to rewind the history tape, to the instant just before you made your decision, with everything in the universe exactly the same, you’d have been able to make a different one.
But how much do you believe that?
We’ve been taught who we are is a variable combination of nature and nurture.
Our character, skills, and talents are determined by both our genetics and upbringing. We did not choose where we were born, when or to whom, and while we might have refined our natural talents, we didn’t necessarily choose them. Since we have no control over these foundational factors, some people believe that every choice must ultimately trace back to pure luck.
From this logic, everything that happens in the world is completely caused by the things that happened before it.
We can trace nearly every effect back to some explicable, measurable cause— until we get to our brain.
But since our decisions and intentions involve neural activity, why would a neuron be exempt from the laws of physics any more than a rock, a butterfly, or a sunrise?
Simply because the brain is the place where we experience consciousness cannot bring it outside the very universe it is a part of.
What would it actually mean if my brain, and therefore my choices. were inside that same chain of physical causality?
In 1814, Pierre-Simon Laplace proposed a thought experiment now called Laplace’s demon.
Imagine an intelligence that knew the exact state of everything in the universe and understood all the laws governing how those things interact.
In a classical deterministic universe, it could theoretically calculate what happens next.
I mentally transport myself back to the hospital recovery room and try to witness this hypothetical intelligence firsthand.
I imagine it already holds the knowledge of the entire physical state of the universe, right up to the moment before my 14-year-old self looked at that girl and made my declaration. I think about how that intelligence would know everything about me —including the state of my brain at that very moment, the pain in my body, my memories, everything I had experienced before and everything happening around me then —and somehow, it understood perfectly how all of those things would interact...would it already know that I would choose not to be a victim, that I would choose to be strong?
I keep rewinding the tape. Atom for atom, everything in the entire universe is identical. And I start my search over and over again. If everything is exactly the same, where could a different choice possibly come from?
Maybe I would choose differently and access an entirely different timeline of existence. But how would I do that? Randomness? But I didn’t choose the randomness either.
Maybe it could occur through a non-linear vortex of time where a future or past version of me introduced an edge into the microcosm of existence and changed my mind? Are there multi-worlds with fractionary risks of colliding, producing change? Or is the idea that I could have chosen differently just an after-thought that gives me a sense of personal agency in the face of determinism?
It is curious to me that I can remember with such precision the declarative moment when I decided that I will never be a victim. I know exactly when and where I chose, in that pivotal moment, to be strong. But I have no idea where that thought came from before I thought it.
How do things arise in our consciousness?
We study the brain, but we do not know. There is much we still don’t know. We only have theory; our thoughts about our thoughts.
Neuroscience has shown that the neural activity involved in a choice can begin before we even become consciously aware of making it. That’s as close as we’ve gotten, but this doesn’t prove that free will doesn’t exist. Although it does make me question the degree to which my conscious awareness is always the thing initiating what I experience as a choice.
The brain fascinates me deeply. I can use it intentionally in powerful and complex ways. But most of the time, thoughts just seem to appear. I can examine them, challenge them, act on them or ‘let them go’, but I don’t seem to have much choice in which thought arrives before its there.
I remember thinking, with absolute conviction, that I would never be a victim, but I don’t remember choosing to have that thought. It arose in a mind that had already been shaped by fourteen years of experiences, biology, relationships and interpretations of the world.
There is a philosopher, Galen Strawson, who argues that free will is logically impossible, and simply a necessary psychological illusion. This poses a particularly annoying question to me about whether we can ever truly claim responsibility for the person we have become in the first place.
Even if I insist that I made myself into who I am today, and in many very real ways, I feel that I have, the version of me capable of making those changes already had to exist.
I had to already possess some combination of the desire, determination, curiosity, pain, resilience or stubbornness required to change. And if I say that I developed those qualities, I can just move the question backwards again: what made the earlier version of me want to develop them? Inevitably, I will always arrive at some previous version of myself who was working with material she did not choose.
And yet, I something within me cannot accept that choice is a mere meaningless artifact of determinism or luck. I have too much evidence from struggling inside my own life with choices that dramatically changed things. I have made good choices, bad choices, different choices, and I’ve changed my mind about my choices many times.
It’s only now that I’ve wrapped us in this mental pretzel that I think maybe it’s my understanding of freedom that requires a closer examination.
Free used to mean that nothing controls me.I determine myself and I am completely responsible for my reality.
It feels empowering, if not terrifying, but biologically, it’s plainly inaccurate and almost nonsensical.
We are profoundly susceptible organisms influenced heavily by light, food, sleep, movement, other humans, temperature, culture, trauma, history, environment, even these damn algorithms.
Even if we want and work to become uninfluenced, we won’t fully achieve it because we are not separate, and we cannot be separate. We are a part of this world, of this universe, and that interconnectedness is not neutral —neither on us, nor the system to which we belong.
Maybe what I think of as ‘freedom’ is more so increasing my capacity to recognize what is influencing me, and participating more genuinely, or dare I say, more consciously, in what shapes me next.
I don’t think ‘being free’ requires me to somehow exist outside of cause and effect. There is still an obvious difference between being forced to do something and being able to reflect, consider alternatives, change my mind and act according to what I actually want, even if the person doing all of that has a history that explains why she wants what she wants.
Maybe I have been asking the wrong question. Instead of asking for a measure of how much of ‘me’ I actually chose, I am more interested in what happens once I deepen my awareness and understanding of what has contributed to creating me, so far.
Maybe the most truthful version of myself is not necessarily in conscious control of every variable, but one that is capable of adaptive response to more fully participate in my very next choice. Come what may.
“He who will not when he may, when he will he shall have nay.”
— Proverb
Choosing to hit publish and go for dinner from the intersection of fate and free will — SJT