ABSTRACT
It is time to return to the questions posed at the beginning of the book: ‘How did I come to be myself? And is what I take to be myself my real self?’ These questions have been unpacked further as the book has progressed. It is now possible to understand the questions in more detail: ‘Is this my real self that experiences, acts, is, feels, thinks, decides to do things for herself?’ ‘Is it still really me after changes to my feelings and ways of understanding and reacting to them?’ ‘As I change, am I being true to myself?’ Alternatively, these questions can be phrased in terms of selves or fragments rather than in terms of a single self: “There are different bits of myself, which appear and act in all the different circumstances of my life: which of these bits are really me?’ ‘Am I being hypocritical as I change according to the company I keep? Or, rather: when am I being my real complex self, and when am I being hypocritical?’ ‘When I change one bit of myself, must I work on all the other bits, if I am to be true to my new self?’
