The Difficulty Of Finding Oneself

keep this passage in mind when you get doxxed…

“Dare only to believe in thyself—in thyself and in thine inward parts! He who doth not believe in himself always lieth! What saith thy Conscience?—‘Thou shalt become what thou art.’”

But over and over again Nietzsche stressed the difficulty of “finding oneself,” of finding within one’s own being a hallowed center of direction and a source of strength that would and could shape a man’s entire life, put it under orders, give it a destiny, and be to it a god.

The “way unto thyself” he pronounced “the way of thine affliction.” Inevitable suffering and danger, even the danger of self-destruction, lurked about the path of the man who set out on this quest. It would be easy for him to miss the path, and, missing it, he might never find his way to the light, but instead spend all his days groping hopelessly through the black depths of a labyrinth. Or, to put the matter differently, he would for a while and maybe for a long while have to bear a constant and bitter struggle with all the refractory elements within himself, which refused to take orders from any god, which in fact would fain set up as gods themselves, and would at the least throw themselves across the path of obedience to any other. 

Worse yet, he would have to be equal to giving pain to those nearest to him, who could not understand or who disapproved: it might become necessary for him to cut off the hands of those dear ones who were determined to hold him back. Sooner or later, he would have to throw away, one by one, every crutch of dependence upon tradition, authority, and the experience of other men. He must be prepared, as the final price of his integrity, to endure the icy breath of an inner aloneness like that of the Polar wastes, or of a star projected into desert space.

-William Gayley Simpson, excerpted from Which Way Western Man