The natural sense that you are an independent being possessing free will and, as long as life persists, are rooted in an open and public present is a component of phenomenal existence. Remaining in the phenomenal but shifting focus to its theorising about itself you might consider this sense to derive from a transfer of energy between levels of subjective embodiment. This is a different register of language for what in other contexts is called feeling and intent. Consciousness in actuality is grasped peripherally as a succession of pre-reflective phases of absorption to which the loose name of 'energy' can be applied. There is naturally no theory of the succession, but the alterations in the topology of feeling that accompanies its instances has an explicit and discursive dimension as the sense of self. Nothing is real but absorbed consciousness, and self-theorising is a peculiar and superficial concomitant of that. A project exists to refine that theorising and make it less superficial but most of its content is drawn from cultural rather than direct self-reflection. Even 'energy' is never felt but only its change or transfer from one system to another and the reason this term seems appropriate is because there is  an opposition between a realism in which it is strictly conserved and an idealism in which such exchanges seem to generate a surplus. To shift the metaphor slightly the independent self is an arbitrage between the different modes of absorption. Again it is as if to say that the essence of self-consciousness is the conviction of immortality, which is neither real nor illusory.