From Fate to Destiny

Self-Return vs. Self-Creation In Jewish thought, teshuvah — repentance — is often described in two ways.

1. Self-Return This view sees repentance as coming back to your original, pure self: the soul as it was before mistakes, pain, or moral failure. The goal is restoration, to remove the layers of damage and return to the authentic person you once were.

2. Self-Creation Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik offers a second view: repentance as self-creation. Here, the goal isn’t just to go back, but to move forward — to take the raw material of your life, including pain, mistakes, and detours, and shape them into a new self that has never existed before.

In this view, the person you become after the struggle can be greater than the person you were before it. The struggle itself becomes a tool of growth, turning you from a passive “person of fate” into an active “person of destiny.”

A Practical Comparison Core Belief

Self-Return: “I have strayed from my original, pure self and must get back to it.”

Self-Creation: “I am called to become a new, greater self than I have ever been.”

View of the Past

Self-Return: Past is the standard; the goal is to restore it.

Self-Creation: Past is raw material; even failure can become the foundation for something higher.

Role of Sin

Self-Return: A stain to remove so the original shines again.

Self-Creation: A catalyst — when faced honestly, it can propel transformation.

Emotional Tone

Self-Return: Nostalgia for lost innocence; focus on repair.

Self-Creation: Visionary drive; focus on building and future potential.

Relationship to Self

Self-Return: “I must uncover who I truly am.”

Self-Creation: “I must craft who I choose to be.”

Relationship to God

Self-Return: Returning to alignment with how God originally made me.

Self-Creation: Partnering with God in the ongoing creation of myself.

Time Orientation

Self-Return: Backward-looking; measures success by restoration.

Self-Creation: Forward-looking; measures success by growth and creation.

Halakhic Actions

Self-Return: Fulfill mitzvot to remove barriers and restore status.

Self-Creation: Fulfill mitzvot to actively shape a new moral-spiritual identity.

Handling Regret

Self-Return: Regret is about the distance from the original state.

Self-Creation: Regret fuels the will to build something better.

End Goal

Self-Return: Innocence regained.

Self-Creation: Wisdom and character forged through struggle.

Why This Matters This concept has been a major part of my own life, and I believe it can completely change how we experience ourselves and our circumstances.

We can live as victims of fate: bitter, resentful, stuck in “why me?” Or we can live as survivors and creators on the path to our destiny, overflowing with gratitude, purpose, and love.

When you start seeing your life through the lens of self-creation, everything changes. Life becomes more vivid and colorful. You begin to see yourself as an active participant in shaping your future, not a passive casualty of your past. And with that shift, you realize that humans have far more control over our happiness than we often believe.

Something else happens too. You start to not only accept suffering, but even to seek it out in the form of challenge and discomfort because you know what it brings you. You know the depth, the growth, the wisdom, and the compassion it leaves behind, and the strength it carves into you.

This realization has shaped so many of my own life choices: pursuing paths that challenge me, willingly stepping into situations that test me, and …learning to sit with my own pain and struggle until it changes me, no matter how hard I try to fight it — and boy, do I try — and complain the whole way through.

In Practice What Rav Soloveitchik describes in theory, I have lived and written about so much in my own life. His framework gave language to my own theories and truths I learned through experience.

And yet again, this philosophy class keeps mirroring the very things I’ve already found for myself. I suppose that’s the nature of philosophy, to articulate what many of us come to understand in our own way. It is also the reason I write: to turn lived experience into something that can help myself and someone else see their own life more clearly, because other people doing that has helped me so much.

And what’s life, if not for learning and connection?

The Self-Portraits This feels like the perfect moment to share two self-portraits I drew years ago — one of the girl I saw as my “authentic” self, and one of the self I created out of shame, the mask I learned to wear.

I’ve wanted to talk about this feeling of a split identity, of different parts of myself, for so long. In many ways, it’s where my story begins. But starting whole, from where I am now, and working backwards feels most right to me.

When I drew them, I believed the goal was to return to the girl on the left. But I’ve since learned that wholeness comes from integrating both, holding gratitude for all my parts, and for every experience that shaped me.

That’s exactly what this concept of self-creation gets at: not just going back, but taking every part of ourselves — even the ones we built in pain — and shaping them into something whole, even stronger, more resilient, and entirely ours.

Choosing Self-Creation For so long, I measured myself against the girl I used to be — the goofy, free-spirited, loving, confident, stubborn child who was so sure of herself.

I told myself: If only I had stayed her. If only I had never taken the Vyvanse. If only I had just followed my heart into writing, comedy, art. If only I had never strayed.

I beat myself up, convinced my life would somehow be better if I’d never made those mistakes.

I used to say to people, “Life is about coming back to who you were as a kid,” and I still believe there is truth there, because our earliest selves often hold the blueprint of our most authentic nature before the world taught us who to be or who not to be.

But I’ve learned that there is something even more powerful than self-return. There is self-creation.

Self-return longs for what was. It looks back with nostalgia, measuring our worth by how close we can get to what we were before our mistakes, before our suffering.

Self-creation looks forward. It takes the raw material of our lives — the pain, the mistakes, the detours — and shapes them into something even greater, that never existed before.

The woman I am today is not simply that little girl who recovered and returned to herself. She is that little girl plus the depths I have traveled.

She feels the struggles of others because she has sat inside her own. She can hold their pain because she has known her own intimately. She treasures peace, love, and wholeness because she has lived in their absence.

I have pulled myself out of darkness and built a respect, confidence, and love for myself that could only come from knowing what it was to lose it.

The hypomania, the depression, the panic attacks, the drugs, the loneliness, the masks, the pleasing, the wrong turns — they have given me a depth of gratitude, love, empathy, and wisdom I could never have found if I had stayed untouched.

If I had only “returned” to who I was before, I would have been a shallower version of myself — still loving and playful, but without the unshakable core I forged in the struggle.

So maybe I took a detour. Maybe I didn’t become the comedian or young writer I imagined as a child. But in that detour, I found a serendipitous path, one that gave me the raw material to become not just who I was, but who I was meant to be.

Self-return brings you back to authenticity. Self-creation makes you more than that, more than just who you were: a person of destiny, not just fate.