As children, we are incredibly creative, curious, and divergent thinkers.
As adults, we are forced to reckon with harsh realities; somewhere along the way, we stopped daydreaming about becoming the next Messi and started working to pay the bills.
Many of us go from school to college to career to marriage to retirement without a second thought, as if we were living on autopilot. We are drawn to this traditional lifestyle because it creates an illusion of security. If it’s worked for so many before me, it has to work for me too, right? …
In the midst of this quest to create security, we fail to realize that this fallacious thinking pulls us away from ourselves. We lose sight of our curiosity and our internal motivation, and start to become burdened by the expectations around and within us.
The questions remain - how can we find our childlike sense of wonder and excitement again? How can we be our true selves?
The first step is to learn about yourself. As we go through life, we all learn to bury different parts of ourselves. Maybe you learned to tell white lies to avoid angry parents. Maybe you wore clothes you didn’t feel comfortable in to hang out with the “cool kids”. Maybe you buried your career aspirations for something more “practical”, or you’ve given up certain hobbies to find time to take care of your kids. Or maybe you’re blindly chasing prestige through your career, without realizing it.
This raises the question - how do you become more in tune with yourself? Meditation may help, but it requires significant amounts of time, patience, and consistency. An easier method is to ask yourself questions. You can start with something small - Why am I not excited to grab dinner with my friends tonight? - and work your way up to understanding an underlying issue in your life. Perhaps you’ve been overworked and just need some rest, or maybe there’s a larger issue of a lack of work-life balance in your life. Alternatively, maybe you realize your friend’s behavior has been bothering you and you haven’t addressed it yet.
The second step is to take action - skip dinner and take the rest you need, or have that difficult conversation with your friend. This sounds obvious; but when the time comes to take action, it’s much harder than we realize. Taking action involves overcoming many of our fears - our fears that we’ll lose friends, that we’ll look stupid, or that we won’t be enough. We might also be afraid of criticism, disapproval, or other negative reactions from others. The key to pushing through our fears is to understand that our current safety blanket is just that - a blanket. It is not a shield from our problems; instead, it blinds us to the dangers of living a life we don’t want to live.
The third and final step is to understand that this process of asking questions and taking action is cyclical in nature. With every iteration of this process, we become one step closer to realizing our true nature.
Sometimes, we might learn that we misunderstood our own desires, or took the wrong action. That’s okay. You’re still better off than where you started; you’re one step closer to truly being yourself.
Learning to be authentic to yourself takes time, effort, and above all, courage. I’ve been on this journey for years, and I’m still not sure I’m entirely there yet. Finding the right questions to ask has been the key to my growth; for example - Do I want this job because it’s exciting or because it’s prestigious? Do I find it exciting simply because it’s prestigious? Even if I don’t have all the answers, I still think that asking these questions is important; they drive me closer to my true self. And at the end of the day, that’s all that matters.
Big thanks to Salman for his feedback on my first draft! Go check out his newsletter if you haven’t already 😄
Photo credits: @bacila_vlad on Unsplash