How To Find Yourself Right Where You Are
For the longest time, I didn’t understand what “finding yourself” really meant. It wasn’t until I completely changed my life that realized I hadn’t been myself in a very long time. I understood I didn’t need to “find myself,” but I needed to get reacquainted with the person I really am, and then find a way to evolve into a better version of me.
However you define what “finding yourself” means to you, in case you realize you do need to, the question that follows is always: how do you do it?
Finding yourself is always a journey, the trick is where you choose to tread it.
I understand the temptation of going away when you realize your life is driving you crazy. The temptation to pack your bags and buy a one-way ticket to a place that sounds exotic and cheap — the perfect place where you can tell your friends that you’re going and sound adventurous enough while knowing you’re not actually risking your life.
Because that’s what you need when trying to find yourself: to stay safe.
To heed the impulse to go away may not necessarily be the answer for you.
I wrote about how you don’t need a six months backpacking trip to “find yourself”, and I stand by it: you don’t.
Forget the supposed glamour of selling your car, subletting your apartment, and jumping on a plane to Asia. Look around you, at your routine and at your relationships, and start from there.
If you don’t recognize yourself anymore, look at your routine. We tend to underestimate how much what we do every day defines who we are. Don’t fall for that trap.
Is work the only regular activity you’re committed to? If so, try signing up for a class, adding some regular volunteering work, or picking up a hobby. Is there anything you enjoyed doing when you were 15 and wish you could still do today? (Anything healthy that is — forget numbing your mind with hours of television or video games).
Our 15 year-old selves never lie. If you were passionate about something when you were 15, chances were it was a true passion. After long hours of school and homework, 15 year-olds don’t waste time with anything that doesn’t truly light their fire.
What did you find yourself reaching for on your free time at 15? A book to read? An instrument to play? Pencil and paper to draw? If you haven’t done those things in a while, it’s time to give them another go.
There’s something about walking the same path to work every day that forms more than a simple routine in your mind. There’s something about walking in the streets near your house or your office that brings you a sense of the larger world around you.
If you have been commuting to work in a state of semi-coma, then it’s time to change that. Make your commute to and from work a time to practice mindfulness. Pay attention to where you are, to the places you drive of walk by, to the people who sit next to you on the train. Practice feeling a sense of place, remind yourself of where you are in the universe. Practice being grateful for having a job to go to in the morning, and a home to come back to at the end of the day.
If your mindfulness exercise doesn’t give you a sense of peace, it might mean it’s time to go look for another job, another career path. What we do every day defines what we do with our lives, and if you don’t feel like your life is centered around the right activities, it might be time to change that just like you’re changing your routine — but you don’t have to move out of the city to do it.
A Harvard study has found that our relationships and how happy we are in them “has a powerful influence on our health.”
Besides helping you live a longer, more fulfilling life, your relationships are also a useful mirror of who you are. To understand yourself, you need to look no further than at the people you relate with on a regular basis. In short, if you don’t even like your friends very much, how can you even like yourself?
To find yourself through your relationships, pay attention to how they are structured. Relationships are all about exchanges, not necessarily of favors or benefits, but of emotional support and real connection. Healthy relationships take effort and work, but the good news is that, if you’re not satisfied with the state of your relationships, it’s up to you to change that.
You can strengthen the bonds you share with your good friends, and even seek to make new ones should you feel the need. Put yourself in situations where you can meet people who share your interests: by joining a club, signing up for a class or becoming engaged in voluntary work.
All you have to do is to be willing to look inside, and be mindful about your routine, your career and your relationships. In the end, who you are stays with you always, no matter where you go, and finding yourself becomes more an exercise of the mind than of the body.
All journeys eventually come to an end. If you leave to find yourself, once you come back to the same life you just left, chances are you’ll fall into the same dissatisfaction that made you want to leave in the first place. There’s no need to go through all of that — work on yourself right where you are, and you’ll realize you knew who you were all along.
How To Find Yourself Right Where You Are
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