How can it be good to be both self-sufficient and selfless, self-made and self-effacing, self-respectful and self-denying, self-possessed and self-sacrificing, self-assertive and self-renouncing? Actually, the word self has trouble retaining its self. It is far more likely to be fused into an adjective, as with the above lists, or a pronoun, as in himself, herself, or myself, But suppose we began to think of self as an entity that we possessed, like a book or a car? And then suppose we freed self from the possessive pronoun and began to write my self or her self or his self, as we might say my
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