A self is a story we tell to bridge who we are and who we have been, turning the fluidity of personhood into a resin of narrative that hardens with each retelling. “If we are creatures of time, then we had better know it,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, “to act responsibly.” And yet we don’t. We encounter each other at points, as points, and promise each other timelines, denying our temporality, denying that time is the measure of change. In reality, the self making the choices at a point in time and the self living with their consequences across the timeline of life, the self avowing the promises and the self keeping or breaking them, are never the same person. To know this about oneself is the beginning of mercy. To embrace it in each other is one of the kindest, most loving things we can do.

Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) was only nineteen when she took up this question with uncommon lucidity in her diary, later published as the endlessly satisfying Diary of a Philosophy Student (public library).

In between laying out her resolutions for a life worth living and contemplating how two souls can interact with one another in friendship and love, she observes that “the true self” is discovered through an interplay between the freedom of choice and the constraints of circumstance. But because circumstances are always changing and choices are dynamic processes rather than static products of the will, the self is a moving target. She writes:

A choice is never made, but constantly in the making; it is repeated every time that I become conscious of it.

With an eye to “the great hatreds of love, the irremediable pride, the passionate ruptures, the mutual tortures” that would bedevil every love if we didn’t counter them with “a lot of tenderness and pity,” she considers the tenderness for change — in oneself and in the other — essential to love yet unaccounted for in the fundamental premise of marriage:

The horror of the definitive choice is that we engage not only the self of today but also that of tomorrow. And this is why marriage is fundamentally immoral. Thus, we must try to determine which one repeats our changing self the most often. One must create a sort of abstract self and say to oneself: this is the state in which I find myself the most often; this is what I want the most often; thus, this is what suits me.

Already familiar with the singular suffering of regret — that punishing wish that the past self had made choices better suited to the values and needs of the present — she resolves:

No, no pity for my vanished past. Live in the present. It is beautiful enough if I know how to make it so.

Couple with Adam Phillips on the art of self-revision and the courage to change your mind, then revisit Simone de Beauvoir on how chance and choice conspire to make us who we are.