Whatever happens in our lives no matter how far we feel we have wandered into some inescapable morass, or simply become so totally distracted and even debilitated we feel we have lost our connection to our becoming self, our search continues unabated. Often, our search for and our return to the becoming self comes in very small increments, but as we just discussed, no matter how small each increment, even if we barely notice them, they will accumulate and we will feel their presence within us at one time or another. We don't need patience so much as to choose acceptance of the pattern, rhythm, and pace of ourselves and our lives. We want to choose those things that we believe will help us in our search for the becoming self and participate in our fully becoming life, the life of the I/Thou, the moral sphere, and the ends principle. We can choose the unconditional, and with it, our autonomy. The more and more we feel the power of the autonomy we gain from our growing awareness or our becoming self, the more we will accept others as they come to us in their autonomy and form community of individuation without conformity. We can and will find and create our liberation from the fears and suffering that have bound us to reliving the fears and judgments of our lives.
In my earlier years, I felt that death was the only liberation from how I felt every day and all through the sleepless nights. The nightmare of living held me fast to it, and I knew that death offered the only peace. At some point, I found that I didn't want to die, to feel my life and light become extinguished. At first, I felt a great disappointment and sorrow at the loss of that idea. Incrementally, I accepted it and started to face myself and the world differently, not quite so temporarily. The pain and madness I felt seemed all the more naked and intimidating, but I simply wasn't going to kill myself, so I wanted to deal with it. At the time, I would have said that I had to deal with it, but that wasn't really the case, but that's how my meaning perspectives perceived it. I didn't have to. I could have died instead. As soon as I lost the impulse to what Freud called the death drive or generally others call Thanatos, I wanted to live. I just didn't know how to call it that. If I wasn't forced to live, had to live, I felt I couldn't. The truth now seems more that I couldn’t accept the power of my decision to live, but the power came nonetheless, and I wanted to live as fully as I could at whatever level I could at any given time. My meaning perspectives kept me from seeing and feeling it that way, indeed, it has come fully to me just as I write this. The moment I stopped wanting to die and planning on dying, I wanted to live, no matter how hard or painfully. I wanted it, no matter how much I resented it or for how long I resented it; I wanted to live.[151]