Self-expression

The performance of some activity, whether artistic or mundane, in order to express one's self independent of another's appreciation of the action, may be referred to as self-expression. This seems to be the spontaneous response to an inner necessity; it may take the form of play, as with children, or to some extension of the concept of play, where a common factor seems be the satisfaction of using the faculties employed to the point of complete exhaustion. This is true of artistic self expression, when the act of creation employs all the energies while the state is of being most one's self and yet beyond one's self; but the concept can be extended to the experience of work and to the religious life. Religion has been regarded as "the spontaneous act of the soul in response to its most intimate sense of absolute worth". Often the process of self-expression may be arduous, through "cries and groanings of the spirit"; but when the individual may be said fully to express himself there is the experience of self-realization.