All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was.
I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: that I am nobody but myself.
~Ralph Ellison, "Battle Royal"