There Is No Self-Actualization.

My property manager has been doing something that has been irritating me and the experience is really humiliating. Don't get me wrong I know it's not personal. She is just doing her job and following the rules she was given but the rules don't always account for the people they land on, and this one has been landing on me in all the wrong ways. I was so tempted to tell her that repeating a threat four times doesn't make me understand it deeper but I decided I won't gain anything by doing so. So I decided to be neutral like Switzerland.

And then I thought: where does that phrase even come from?

I googled it and what I found was not the meaning of the phrase but a king. A living, current, self-declared King of Switzerland with a flag, an imperial bank, a military legion, a formal constitution, and 151 plots of land legally acquired across nine Swiss cantons. The whole time I was reading through his website I was dying with laughter. I honestly thought he was mentally ill or this whole kingship was just satire but then I saw the coronation photos. He was serious. Completely and uncomplicatedly serious. There was a church, people, and a crown. To make matters even more interesting, this same man had run for city council in Burgdorf and won. Real people actually voted for him despite knowing he was a self proclaimed king.

The absurdity pulled me deeper and somewhere along the way my laughter stopped. Every word in there sounded so familiar, like a physical exploration of my mind.

That is when the questions started. Where did he get the permission to do all this? Did he start dreaming about this when he was young? Did his parents encourage him or did he arrive at this alone? Now that he is living his reality, is he satisfied? Is he self actualized? Does he want more?

I did not know how to answer them so I went back to the most famous map of human becoming ever drawn: Maslow's Hierarchy of needs. I nitpicked at it the whole day. The more I tried to think Jonas and myself through the hierarchy, the more something felt wrong with the map. The ending was all wrong.

Abraham Maslow introduced his Hierarchy of Needs in 1943 in a paper called "A Theory of Human Motivation." In it, he argued that human beings are motivated by needs that build on each other. At the bottom was survival, above that, safety, then love and belonging, then esteem and at the top, self-actualization where one becomes their fullest self. So: Climb -> Meet the needs -> Arrive. The concept is usually illustrated in a triangle and I have seen it almost every where in my psychology books at university, therapy and even at work.

Back then I took this information as complete but now when I think about it, it's incomplete. It ends at the border of a territory I live in and the first thing it misses is where any of us actually start.

None of us begin at the bottom of our own pyramid. We are born inside someone else's. Our parents build the first floors before we arrive; food, shelter, safety, love, esteem. We inherit the structure without knowing it exists, live inside it, are shaped by it and we move through levels we did not climb ourselves.

I was born into my mother's and my father's pyramid. I occupied every level. I was actualized at every one but it was both mine and not mine. I was genuinely becoming but inside a structure I had not built and did not choose.

When I reached 18, I pridefully declared myself an adult and told my mum she couldn't tell me what to do anymore because I had an ID and I meant it. That moment was my first declaration of selfhood. It is also the first actualization that was entirely my own and where the infinite pyramid began. What I didn't know then was that I was already building and what I was building would look nothing like a map.

At eighteen I left and enrolled in university to study psychology, found my own apartment, started an internship, and built a life all at the same time. I also made friends both at work and school, belonging outside of family for the first time. A year later, I was promoted from intern to staff while carrying a full course load.

Here is what Maslow got wrong about the word he saved for the top; Self-actualization. It isn't a destination. Every level has its own actualization. I did not wait until level five to become. I became at every single level. So the word Maslow saved for the top was happening in every moment of me securing each one of those things. I know this from living the whole pyramid and then watching it fall.

At fifteen I made a vision board and put Oxford on it. I didn't get to Oxford but I got into Yale instead. So, different institution, same dream. I was so excited. This was the mark of a new beginning. I had actualized my dream. Yale however didn't turn out as expected. I struggled with chronic impostor syndrome. I kept ruminating on what was next. I was completely free; no parents or safety net and I did not know what to do with that freedom. So the next level became finding out who I was without them. I built a family by choice. I met someone, got a house, had a child and got married. We had everything the pyramid said we needed.

Then it collapsed.

Graduation was supposed to be self-actualization. I was so happy. I thought I had arrived but we soon after became homeless.

We lost everything instantly. One moment I was at the top of the pyramid and the next I was at the bottom with no food, shelter or safety. We lived with people who took us in and after a year moved to a house full of roaches. We started over from nothing.

Maslow's pyramid has no gravity. It does not acknowledge that the whole structure can collapse overnight and has no language for the person who free-falls from level five to level one in a single moment.

But here is what I discovered in the rubble. The pyramid had collapsed but I didn't.

Everything I had actualized at every level I had climbed was still inside me. I used the lessons I got from my parents' pyramid and from my own first pyramid to start over in Ohio. I knew how to navigate institutions, how to hold a family together in crisis and how to survive the world based on experience. I used all of this information to build the third pyramid; getting a car, finding safety, rebuilding esteem, creating a life again from the ground up.

This re-climb is its own actualization.

And then we improbably arrived. A luxury apartment, children, a steady job for my husband, a car. Everything the pyramid said was enough. But something in me kept asking what was next.

I had already built esteem but I felt like there was something unnamed above it; self awareness. So I decided to build the next level. Now, some would say self-awareness lives inside self-actualization but I didn't find it there. I found it after as its own level and arrival. I discovered who I was far from the anxiety and all the surviving. I started writing and found an interior life I have always had but didn't have the stability to tend to. The thoughts had been in there for so many years and they were so chronic and consuming that my husband and mum grew concerned watching me zone out for hours at a time. They suggested writing them down, and the thought of it was terrifying. When I finally brought myself to write, what came out was not new. It was my mind finally being audible. Now that I am self aware, the question is already forming again. What next?

I have the answer. It's the new role, work, and the contribution I haven't made yet. That is self-actualization, the top of Maslow's pyramid and I am still climbing toward it. However, I already know that when I arrive, I will be at the base of something new, built through the desire for more becoming. Through the perpetual human ache for something more.

The pyramid has no ceiling. It keeps generating itself one actualization at a time.

There was one more fundamental thing that Maslow got wrong. He identified self-actualized people by observing them from the outside. Einstein. Eleanor Roosevelt. He looked at these people's lives and decided that that is what arrival looks like. In doing so, he made self-actualization a verdict that others deliver and not a state one inhabits.

But self-actualization, if it exists at all, is interior. It is a felt sense of perpetual becoming. No observer can access that interior. Which means self-actualization can never be confirmed from the outside. It can only be projected.

We do this every day on social media when we look at someone whose exterior pyramid appears complete and we call them arrived. But we are not seeing their pyramid. We are seeing our own longing for arrival reflected back at us through their image.

If these people were to speak honestly, they would tell us there is still something that they need to achieve. There always is.

There is no self-actualization. There is only perpetual actualizing. A summit that dissolves the moment you reach it and reveals another above. We are not climbers reaching a peak. We are the pyramid building itself one actualization at a time.

Forever.