readoldthings

From:

Like you, I grew up in a religious rural town, so by my teens I was an atheist anarchist, at least according to me. Then I moved to California and became a conservative Druid.

Funny how that works...

And this is excellent advice:

It's worth questioning how much what I consider "myself" is a reaction to something around me, versus authentic. As you mentioned via Sun Tzu, maybe we can get at this by watching what stirs the personality to action, and the nature of that action, and contrasting it with those movements that seem to well up from within ourselves and change only in particularity with circumstances.