Your Deepest Measure
“It is not so easy to become what one is, to rediscover one's deepest measure.” ALBERT CAMUS · NUPTIALS AT TIPASA
Camus wrote this in an essay otherwise given over to pleasure, and the sentence interrupts it. Become what one is. The phrase reads like a contradiction, since whatever a person already happens to be should require no becoming at all.
He calls it difficult, which is where he parts company with most talk about being yourself. The usual promise runs the other way. Remove the pressures and a truer version of you is supposed to be sitting there already, intact, waiting to be let out.
Camus assumes nobody is waiting. A life has to be built to fit its own dimensions, and the fitting is slow. Then look at his verb. Rediscover. He grants that you had this information once and simply stopped consulting it.
The evidence is easy to collect and unpleasant to read. Describe your life to a stranger, then set the description beside your actual week. The sentences people use about themselves and the record of how they spent their days rarely belong to the same person.
Write one sentence about yourself that last week would confirm. Not the flattering version, not the punishing one. The accurate one, at your real size. Then spend today as the person in that sentence instead of the person in the other.
