Who Am I?

By Jean Venel Casséus Who am I? Behind this seemingly innocuous question lies a dizzying sensation. An inner tremor. A possible collapse of the edifice patiently built from inherited habits, traditions, and certainties. To ask this question is to open a breach in reality, to enter a space where benchmarks waver, where nothing is guaranteed in advance. And yet, it is through this very breach that the true entry into adult existence occurs. Adult not in the legal or administrative sense, but in the existential sense: the one who chooses to give meaning to their life, instead of merely enduring its fabric. To no longer live according to an imposed narrative, but to begin to inhabit one's own words, one's own becoming. This territory is harsh, uncertain. Without vision, without inner direction, without fidelity to a quest, one dissolves within it. Collective identities, however reassuring (religion, homeland, lineage), become too narrow to contain the surge of a “self” in gestation. Everything must then be rethought, refounded. Yet no one chooses the moment of this confrontation. It is existence itself that, sooner or later, imposes it. For some, the question arises in childhood, in the form of a tragedy. For others, it appears later, during a bereavement, a collapse, an exile, or a profound disillusionment. It comes without warning. It interrupts. It calls. And there, everything is at stake. One cannot avoid it without paying the price: forgetting oneself, letting the world write the story of our life in our place. To flee this question is to withdraw from oneself. It is to consent to live by default. To refuse to confront it is to shirk one's most intimate sovereignty. It is to abandon the possibility of fully inhabiting the verb to exist. And yet, as destabilizing as it may be, this question is also the most fertile. It engages a dual quest, both carnal and spiritual. It is a search for places, for connections, for causes to embrace. But it is also a dive into the invisible: into what we believe, what we fear, what we hope. It demands actions, but also faith. Faith in humanity, in meaning, in the possibility of becoming. This quest is far from comfortable. It worries, it sometimes isolates. But it awakens. It reveals. And above all, it reinstalls the individual at the heart of their own life, with the immense and formidable power to say: « I am ». May 10, 2025