ABSTRACT
Do you often feel in the course of daily activities that you are not yourself? That your actions do not mirror your spirit, the core of who you are, and that you are engaged in a repetitive series of motions that do not originate within you? A feeling often felt by most adults, and yet rarely by children. Children at play are free. Adults at work are constrained by job descriptions and the expectations of others. The question “How am I not myself?” was first made popular by the movie “I Love Huckabees” (also known as “I Y Huckabees”) and immediately captured the imagination of a wide millennial audience. We all ask of ourselves at times, “What am I doing now that I don’t really want to do?” “What would I do now if I had the freedom to be myself?” We play because we need to explore our own boundaries for freedom, to discover pleasure, and to explore. We play because we need to discover how it does feel to be ourselves. And so to the question “How am I not myself?” the answer is:
I am not myself anytime I do stuff that I don’t want to do, for reasons that are not mine, in a place not of my choosing, and for reasons outside myself. To re-become me, I need the freedom to be who I am, and for that I need play as a condition of being.
