From Self-Image to the Imageless Self: Awakening to the Vertical Life (Part 1)

Photo by Tanja Tepavac on Unsplash

Pause. Take a breath. And once your mind is still, close your eyes and think of yourself.
What do you see?

Is it you before you gained weight? Is it you after the promotion you’ve always wanted? Or is it you as you are now?

You can’t actually see yourself now, of course—but in your mind there’s a photograph, a composite image of who you take yourself to be. A self-image. It’s what you continually measure yourself against, and it only exists—or has meaning—so long as it differs from the self you once were and the self you still hope to become. The first hovers over your back with judgment; the latter beckons you forward with promise. And between them, your present self is caught—never quite enough for the one, never yet enough for the other.

This is why Molly, when asked to think of herself, doesn’t picture the moment she was most happy—when her father took her to the Father-Daughter Ball when she was nine and bought her a red dress with a red velvet bow she can still feel in her hair seventy years later. Rather, she sees herself sitting on her couch watching TV, trying to forget that her sons, Jake and Mike, are well past the point of reproducing, and wondering how not to betray Jack—God rest his soul—when talking to the other widowers at church. And even when she does dress up—when she puts on her makeup, her sapphire necklace, and her favorite blue dress—there’s still that sad, sinking feeling every time the corner of her eye catches the mirror and glimpses the sagging, wrinkled stranger looking back.

And then there’s Tessa—much younger, still on the front end of the story. Ask her what she thinks about herself, and it’s difficult even to untangle. A friend on the bus heard from Cherry, who heard from Fanny, that Freddy—with the razor-sharp cheeks and thick black hair—might like her. That’s why she’s started wearing eyelash extensions, thick black mascara, and searching for push-up bras online—that, and because Jolene ruined her life by posting a photo on Instagram that not only went viral but broadcast to everyone her bust size and every pimple on her face. With all this in her head, the moment she is asked to think about herself, she’ll likely just pull out her smartphone and flip the camera around—trying not to think of that viral image from before the acne cream, all while knowing, in her gut, that if she’s this flat-chested going into sophomore year, she will never have the body or the face she believes she must have.

Now these examples should seem somewhat relatable. Everyone experiences the intersection of the future ideal self, the past self, and the present. For some, it is a nuisance. For others, it is torment.

Think of the experience of looking in the bathroom mirror. For each of us, what it reflects back varies. One day it reflects someone who still might become who they were meant to be. On another, it greets us with questions. But then there are those for whom it ceases altogether to be a mirror, and instead becomes a judge, passing a definitive sentence: What you have done can never be forgiven. No matter what you do, you’ll never become who you need to be to make up for it.

I know this, not as a philosophical claim or a psychological theory, but because I’ve seen that judge before: the night I drew up a noose, set my neck in it, and nearly ended my life—just before my wife broke in and stopped me. I had become convinced that there was no longer any hope for me as a father. I had been psychotic. I had done things unforgivable. I had not been present for years of my children’s lives. The man I believed I was supposed to be had long passed beyond reach, and the man I had actually become, in my own mind, was a curse upon those I loved. I wanted to die because I believed it was the only way left to show my family the love they deserved. I would rather go to hell, and provide my wife a chance to remarry and my children to have a real father, than continue to exist in this world.

My wife told me that the father they wanted was me. But at the time I couldn’t see it—that simply because I was their father, they loved me. And that no matter how long I was stuck in bed, how much the ECT had obliterated my memory, or how much my medication had blunted my personality, for them I was still Father.

I made it out of that noose that day, but it was not until I spoke with my spiritual father—an abbot at the monastery my family visits each year—that something shifted in me permanently. He told me, very simply, that he tries not to have a self-image. It had never crossed my mind that such a thing was even possible. I had already recognized that the dissonance between who I was and who I believed I needed to be was the core of my suffering—but when he said I could simply live without a self-image at all, it was as though lightning struck.

I do not have to measure myself against myself or against anyone else.
I do not have to believe that whoever I imagine myself to be has any authority over who I am.
I do not have to live under the verdict of my past or the demands of my future.
I can simply be.

At the time, I did not yet know the words of Gregory of Nyssa, but there is a quote of his that perfectly captures the roomy depths that opened up to me that day:

“Since the nature of our intellect, which is in accordance with the image of the Creator, evades knowledge, it has an accurate likeness to the transcendent One, figuring by its own unknowability the incomprehensible nature.”¹

I came to see, suddenly, that my inner life was not reducible to what I thought about it, and my identity cannot be comprehended by any photo or image of self—past, present, or future. Rather, there is a depth within me that exceeds all intelligibility. My awareness, my “I,” is not an object. It is not an image. It is not an idea. It is an ineffable depth that opens unto the radiant ocean of God Himself, in whom “I live and move and have my being.” It is an eye that needs not identify with any thought or fleeting image that passes through its field of awareness.

Once one begins to perceive the distinction between who I think I am and who I truly am, a completely different horizon opens. One’s life no longer has to be determined by what they were, or by what they fear they will fail to become, but by the true depth and height of what it means to be human. This means I am not a fixed point on a horizontal timeline, condemned to measure my worth by past failures or future fantasies. I am a being with an infinite capacity for growth. A ladder has been set before me—not one I climb toward some idealized projection of myself, but toward God Himself. A depth has opened within me, inviting me to descend ever more deeply into the radiant ocean of God and his mercy and compassion.

Once this distinction is perceived, the question naturally arises: What then determines our life? If I am not the sum of my past, nor the projection of my future, nor reducible to any image held in my mind or in the minds of others, then what axis remains on which my life can unfold? This is the question we will turn to next. For what has been described here is not merely our struggle with self-image, but the very infrastructure that sustains it—our perception that we exist on a horizontal plane, a plane measured in time, progress, success, decay, reputation, and comparison.

In the next post, we will examine how this horizontal mode of existence governs our lives without our even realizing it, and how a different plane—a vertical plane—stands open before us: a plane not determined by circumstance or achievement, but by spiritual ascent, growth in virtue, and participation in the life of God. Only when we begin to move vertically do we become steady, unshaken by what we have been or what we fear we will fail to become, and begin at last to live from the depth of who we truly are.

1. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Human Image of God 11.4, trans. John Behr