What Are You Really ?

Last time, I wrote about how life itself can be a way to live forever. But forever is a long time to carry a question that keeps echoing in every mind: Who am I in all this?

The ancients dressed it up in riddles like the Ship of Theseus. Psychologists dress it up in theories of identity. But the question itself refuses to die. It’s the same one you’ve asked yourself in silence, maybe after someone called you a name that stuck, maybe when your beliefs didn’t feel like home anymore.

So let’s walk into it — not to answer it once and for all, but to peel it open until it bleeds truth.

You’ve heard of the “Ship of Theseus,” maybe. A riddle philosophers sometimes hold up like a mirror—sometimes to hide behind it. But what’s the ship’s problem, and what’s yours? Let’s strip the question to the bone until only answers remain.

The Ship of Theseus question is, at its core, about identity. A ship—named “The Ship of Theseus.” The riddle asks: if every piece is replaced one by one—planks, nails, sails—does it remain the same ship? Or is it something else entirely?

It’s a subtle way of staging an identity crisis with minimum panic. But you’ve probably stood in that same spot, asking the same question—not about a ship, but about yourself.

For me, it was never just a riddle. This question meant everything.

When you were young, people might have called you a name based on your behavior or attitude — “the quiet one,” “the troublemaker,” “the smart kid.” Without knowing it, you might have fed that label into the very part of your psyche responsible for identity. Psychologists call it labeling. I call it the first misinformation about ourselves.

Because once you accept the label, it doesn’t just describe you — it shapes you. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You start to perform the role they wrote for you. And the more you play it, the more convincing it looks, until you forget you were ever capable of being anyone else. That’s how we get trapped in the perceptions of others — a prison built from words, sometimes not even vaguely.

You don’t reject the labels society gives you in one glorious moment. You grow out of them. One day you realize you’re capable of much more than what you’ve been told, and that realization burns the first layer away.

But then comes the second hurdle — and this one is far tougher, because it isn’t forced on you. It’s chosen by you. Maybe it was planted by society, maybe it was born from your own experience — either way, it takes root inside. You call it a belief.

You search for meaning in this chaotic world and latch onto an ideology, a religion, a school of thought. It tells you who you are, who you should be, how you ought to live. For a while it feels like fulfillment — until the role begins to choke you. Until the script doesn’t match the life you’re living.

That’s when rebellion stirs. You stand at a crossroad once again: change your belief, or abandon belief altogether.

You don’t just shed labels. You don’t just outgrow beliefs. Beliefs are even more important than labels — and inevitably a crack appears. At first it’s small, invisible even, but with every incident that doesn’t match the belief, the crack widens. Until one day you ask a single question, and the whole structure shatters under its own weight.

You fall into the void again.

This is what Nietzsche perhaps called the Abyss.

There’s a silence there — heavy, suffocating, sacred. Because without labels, without beliefs… who are you?

Most people can’t bear it. They rush back to adopt new beliefs, new roles, or even the same old labels just to escape the silence. Because to sit in it is unbearable.

But if you dare to stay, even for a while, you’ll notice something. The world doesn’t collapse with your identity. The sun still rises. You still breathe. You still move.

And that’s when the question “Who am I?” begins to burn differently.

That’s when you begin to see for the first time what has always been beneath the masks of labels and the armor of belief.

Here, you are met with nothingness.

It drives you mad.

The less brave believe it is the end of meaning itself. They grow tired of suffering, and when they see there is no meaning to it all, their courage cracks like glass. Everything that once carried them—faith, identity, belonging—abandons them now. And they are left alone with the lack of meaning.

This is the Abyss.

The last destination in man’s search for meaning.

I’ve been there. I haven’t read Nietzsche in detail, yet I know he must have stood here too, staring into this same abyss. I understand what he meant when he said the abyss stares back. Not many hearts can endure such a gaze.

What is the Abyss that I am so obsessed with? It is obsession itself.

It goes by many names: ego death, nothingness, the void, the collapse of meaning.

Why is it so unbearable to face? Because when it stares back, it strips away every false comfort. Every borrowed belief. Every illusion of purpose. It leaves you naked, with nothing to cling to. In that sense—it kills you.

That is why so many great minds collapse before it. They are consumed by its revelation of nothingness. It meets them at their weakest, when they have no cause left to hold onto. They break. Some end their lives by their own hand, unable to bear the weight of existence without meaning. Others sabotage themselves slowly, rotting alive, whispering, “Why bother?”

But then—there are a few. A rare few.

When the Abyss stares into them, they smile.

For these, the void is not an executioner but a liberator. What the abyss destroys is only the false. And what survives its gaze is real, unshakable.

But the abyss is not quick in its cruelty. It doesn't consume you all at once. It does not shout. It keeps whispering, Slightly. Again and again. It stretches time until days feel like years and nights feel endless. You wake up and wonder why? You eat, breathe, move, work and with a big question mark hanging above everything — Why? It doesn't matter. Nothing you do matters. It just doesn't make sense to your mind to keep going. Yet your body is used to all this so you keep going. Hollowed out from the inside. This is the real terror of the abyss. The hollowness of your chest that lets you breathe just enough to stay alive.

The abyss does not stay outside of you. It slips in. It becomes the silence in your own head, the echo in your chest, the voice that sounds like your own when it tells you, “This is all you’ll ever be.” You don’t fight an enemy out there—you fight the emptiness that feels like it has always belonged to you.

That’s when it feels as though you’re stranded on a ship with no sails and no compass. Just drifting. The philosophers call it “the search for meaning,” but let’s be honest: it feels more like being stuck on a dumb boat in the middle of nowhere, waiting for a wind that never comes.

And maybe that’s why people collapse. Because how do you resist something that feels like yourself?

If you stare long enough , you discover that beneath the silence, there is something that cannot be taken from you.

This is the paradox: the abyss strips you of meaning only to reveal that you never needed it to exist in the first place. You are still breathing, still standing, stripped bare but alive. And in that bare survival, in that naked awareness, you discover a strange freedom. For if nothing matters, then you are free to make everything matter. If the abyss takes away the inherited meanings of gods, labels, nations, and titles — it leaves you with the raw clay of existence itself. That clay is yours to shape, yours alone. And this is why the few who do not collapse in front of the abyss walk away smiling: because what was meant to kill them has given them absolute liberty.

So what can you do in the face of your own reasoning, always trying to snatch the experience of life out of your hands? Be stupidly irrational and optimistic. Tell yourself it’s all for the good — even when your mind screams that it isn’t. Because truth is, it doesn’t know shit. And if it did, well, there have been philosophers with minds bigger and fatter than yours, and even they didn’t figure it out. So save yourself the struggle.

Live as though the weight has lifted. Let optimism — even when irrational — be the quiet rebellion against despair. Because if you wander back into that endless questioning, you won’t find truth waiting for you. You’ll only find the abyss, wearing yet another mask.

So live it. Do whatever makes the days less heavy and the nights less long. Be stubbornly optimistic, even irrationally so. Because if you start searching again for some grand, serious meaning, you’ll only fall back into the abyss — or worse, into somebody else’s ideology. And honestly, isn’t it funnier to just live and let things turn out good, rather than wasting another lifetime trying to prove to yourself why they should?

Oh, and about that ship I mentioned earlier — I don’t think you’re still hung up on that. You’re free to call it whatever the hell you want. It doesn’t matter.