Beyond Essentialism: Embodied Identity And The Self (A Working Idea)

So I started re-reading Lakoff & Johnson's "Philosophy In The Flesh" over the last few weeks and it's all been wandering through my brain and I think I've finally reached a bit of an understand. This may not make a lot of sense but it's still a work in progress and, really, I think it makes a lot of sense.
THE CRUX of the issue is that a large portion of philosophy (at least existential philosophy) is the question of essentialism: what are the necessary and sufficient qualities of something that define IT and, for humans, WHO and WHAT am I. The greatest problem that this results in is that most people end up in a reductive essentialism where they want to find their one true self, the one part of themselves that is them and no one else.

The fact is THERE IS NO ONE TRUE SELF, which is why people spend their lives in vain searching for it (those who bother with the quest). We are all the result of slightly different programming on similar hardware; we are the physiological consequence of an embodied experience but, importantly, our own UNIQUE embodied experiences. Indeed, there are some universals (or near universals) because we exist in the same physical space with similar physical experiences and limitation, but from that first movement in the womb, our experience is fundamentally individual, for it occurs in a new space and a new time that has never existed before and can never exist again.

There is not one essential James The Linguist, or James The Cook, or James The Man, or James The Anything. We exist at the intersection of this myriad, a collage of our experiences and identities. Life does not bring use deeper into understanding ourselves; it ADDS to us, and we grow and evolve and change, just as our experiences will grow and evolve and change. Underneath these masks there is not one self; together the masks are the self, and to call them masks is to deny their importance to who and what we are BECAUSE THEY ARE ALL THAT WE ARE.

The strangest part of all of this is that this has some similarities with some nihilistic standpoints on life, but I find it oddly... hopefully. The journey to find ourselves is over, because it is pointless. We needn't find ourselves because we already are ourselves. The journey into life continues as it always does but we go into it knowing that are not digging deeper into ourselves but instead adding to the rich tapestry of our identity.