Despair – The Path to Becoming Yourself

Have you ever felt a restlessness you couldn't quite put into words? A sense that something is off, without being able to say exactly what? Kierkegaard would say you were in despair – and that this might be the healthiest thing that could happen to you.

That sounds paradoxical. We tend to think of despair as something to escape, a condition to be treated and made to disappear. But in The Sickness Unto Death – published in 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus – Kierkegaard turns this on its head. Despair is indeed a sickness, he writes, but it isn't one we should try to eliminate at any cost. It is, rather, a sign that we are human beings in the process of growth, in contact with something that demands something of us. The only way out of it is, in fact, through it.

I have spent a long time thinking about this book – first as part of my graduate thesis in social work, and it has stayed with me ever since. What I want to try here is to share what I take to be its core, without the academic scaffolding.

What does it mean to be yourself?

Anti-Climacus opens the book with a question so simple that we rarely ask it of ourselves: What is a human being? Most of us go through life without giving it a thought – we are human, after all, what more is there to ask? But this is exactly where Anti-Climacus starts, and his answer is a claim that at first glance seems almost impenetrable: a human being is spirit, and spirit is the self. But the self, he says, is not a thing we have or possess – it is something we do. The self is a relation that relates to itself.

Let me try to translate that into something more familiar. You are not a finished product. You are constantly in the process of taking a stance toward yourself – toward the life you have lived, the choices you have made, the possibilities that lie ahead of you. To "become yourself" is not about uncovering some hidden, authentic core that has been waiting all along. It is about taking ownership of the life that is already yours, and growing together with it. It is a task, not a state.

And precisely because it is a task, it can fail. This is where despair enters.

Three ways of losing yourself

Kierkegaard outlines what he calls the three forms of despair. The first is not being conscious of having a self at all – living on autopilot, driven by habits and outside expectations, never pausing to ask who one actually is. He calls this "inauthentic" despair, precisely because the person living this way has no idea he is in despair. It may be the most insidious form of all – it disguises itself as normality.

The second is not wanting to be oneself. One may sense who one is, but cannot bear to carry it – one flees from it, represses it, pretends it doesn't apply.

The third – and this is the one that interests Kierkegaard most – is wanting to be oneself, but on one's own terms, detached from whatever has shaped one. A kind of defiant self-assertion that nevertheless ends in a break with oneself.

What unites all three is that they are forms of a misrelation – not simply a deviation, but a relation that has fallen out of balance with itself. And this misrelation is not something that merely happens to us. We ourselves take part in creating it, even when we don't know we're doing so.

The ideals that seduce us

One of the book's most precise points, I think, is this: the problem is rarely that we lack ideals for who we ought to be. The problem is that we want to be someone other than who we actually are. We construct an image of ourselves – perhaps a admirable, even praiseworthy one – and use it as an excuse not to acknowledge who we already are, with all the limitations, history, and vulnerability that entails.

It's a subtle but decisive difference. The ideals themselves are not the problem. The problem is that we use them to escape ourselves.

Why despair isn't simply something to be rid of

Here lies, I think, the most liberating part of Kierkegaard's thinking. He holds that the path to truth and freedom necessarily runs through the negative – through the very despair we would most like to avoid. Not because suffering is good in itself, but because we can only win ourselves back if we have first been capable of losing ourselves. There is no shortcut around it.

That means, as I read it, that the restlessness you might feel – the sense that something isn't right, that your life isn't quite your own – is not necessarily a sign that something is wrong with you. It may, on the contrary, be a sign that you are in touch with the demand to become who you are. Despair, in a somewhat curious phrase, becomes "transparent" when it finally leads us back to the power that created us.

A small theological detour

I can't help drawing in something from my own faith here. For me, this connects to the idea that God became human – that to see the face of the other is to relate to something greater than oneself. In the Gospel I read that whoever receives a little child receives Christ himself. The little child is not only an image of baptism, but an image of a care meant for the small, not the great. To truly see the other requires, I think, that we turn ourselves around completely – which reminds me of Plato's idea of formation (paideia): not adding knowledge, but turning the whole person toward something not yet clearly seen.

The conscience we cannot silence

Finally: Kierkegaard ties this to conscience. Conscience is not simply one inner voice among others – it is that awareness of ourselves that we can never fully get behind. We may try to drown it out, filling our lives with noise to avoid hearing it. But it makes itself known regardless, often as restlessness, anxiety, unease. It cannot be permanently repressed.

And perhaps this is the very consolation in all of it: that your restlessness is not an enemy. It is a sign that you are still alive to the task of becoming yourself.

---

This text draws on a chapter from my reading of Søren Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death (1849) and in a conversation with Claude (Anthropic).