What am I?

What am I? I am a result; I am the result of the past, of innumerable layers of the past, of a series of causes-effects. And how can I be opposed to the whole, the past, when I am the result of all that? If I, who am the mass, the whole, if I do not understand myself, not only what is outside my skin, objectively, but subjectively, inside the skin, how can I understand another, the world? To understand oneself requires kindly and tolerant detachment. If you do not understand yourself, you will not understand anything else; you may have great ideals, beliefs, and formulations, but they will have no reality. They will be delusions. So you must know yourself to understand the present and through the present, the past. From the known present, the hidden layers of the past are discovered and this discovery is liberating and creative.

What am I?  Yes, I'm layer upon layer of happenings; some of my doing and others not.  Yes, I have choices but there's something inside me that is always quite strongly and magnetically attracted to my eventual 'choice'.  What am I?   I'm not what I would want to be; I'm what my environment has formed based on my inherited genetics.  I don't like what I am but the foundation of 'what I am" was taken completely out of my hands.

Even though there is a LOT that I wish I hadn't experienced, I can never say I'd do any of it over, because of it I am me and without even one part of it I would be a different person. I believe I came to learn and it took all of it even the bad to challenge me the way I needed to be.