How does I Am The Messenger portray the message that to find who you are, you must help others? Discuss.

This all becomes clear when Ed opens the folder at the end of the book. It is at this point that he learns that being a messenger was a setup: filling up a church for a priest, befriending a lonely older lady, and buying Christmas lights for a family. All of it was orchestrated by the man with the folder who had visited Ed's town and had noted his pathetically ordinary existence. At the beginning of the book, Ed lives for himself but isn't really living at all. He plays cards with his friends and has no real goals for his life. He is merely existing, taking up space in one little corner of the universe.

Just prior to the bank holdup, I'd been taking stock of my life. Cabdriver—and I'd funked my age at that. (You need to be twenty.) No real career. No respect in the community. Nothing. I'd realized there were people everywhere achieving greatness while I was taking directions from balding businessmen called Derek and being wary of Friday-night drunks who might throw up in my cab or do a runner on me.

In order to find himself, then, he engages with other people who need help. It is through these acts that he determines his own strength, resilience, and resourcefulness. In the end, he becomes the message: Living means existing outside of your own comfort zone and pushing the limits of what you think is possible in order to help other people:

Eventually, I manage to speak again. "Am I real?"
He barely even thinks about it. He doesn't need to. "Look in the folder," he says. "At the end. See it?" In large scrawled letters on the blank side of a cardboard beer coaster, it's written. His answer is written there in black ink. It says, Of course you're real—like any thought or any story. It's real when you're in it."

By interacting with people who need help, Ed learns to be an active participant in his own life.