I’ve been thinking lately about the idea of “finding yourself.” We hear this all the time, someone goes through a big change in life and decides they need to go find themselves. I’ve probably said it myself at some point. But lately I’ve started wondering, where exactly did I go? How do I find something that was never actually lost?
I think maybe we don’t lose ourselves as much as we forget ourselves. Life gets complicated, responsibilities pile up, people need things from us, we make compromises, we take care of whatever is directly in front of us. None of these things by themselves necessarily seem like a problem. In fact most of them probably seem like exactly what we should be doing at the time. But what happens when we do this for too long? What happens when so much of our attention is directed outward that we stop listening to whatever is going on inside?
I had gotten to a point over the last several months where I didn’t really recognize myself anymore. I was exhausted, my brain was fried, I was trying to manage too many things at once and somewhere in all of it I became disconnected from myself. There wasn’t a moment when this happened, at least not one I can identify. I think it happened incrementally, one little thing at a time until eventually I looked around and wondered where the hell I had gone.
What’s interesting is that coming back has happened in much the same way. I didn’t decide one morning that today was the day I was going to “find myself.” I started making things. I started carving wood, working in the garden, building things around my property, reading, listening to music and spending time outside. I started doing things simply because I was curious about them, not because there was some goal attached to them or because they were going to lead anywhere. Slowly I started recognizing something familiar.
Oh, there you are.
Maybe this is what remembering ourselves looks like.
I tend to think of growth as becoming something new. We learn something, acquire some new skill, overcome some problem and become a better version of ourselves. But what if growth can also happen in the opposite direction? What if sometimes growth is stripping away all of the shit we’ve accumulated and remembering something that was already there?
One of the things I’ve been learning, or maybe remembering, is to listen to my intuition. I have spent most of my life relying heavily on my ability to think. I’m very good at taking complicated things apart, understanding how they work and figuring out how to make them work differently. This ability has served me incredibly well and I have been rewarded for it over and over again. If something doesn’t work I change something, test it, gather more information and try again. I keep going until I figure it out.
But not everything works that way.
There have been times over the last year when I think I knew something long before I was willing to accept that I knew it. There was a quiet voice somewhere underneath all the thinking that already had an answer while the rest of me was still collecting evidence, changing variables and trying to figure things out. Why didn’t I listen to it? Maybe because I didn’t like what it was saying. Maybe because intuition doesn’t come with evidence and citations. It just sort of sits there quietly waiting for us to stop talking.
I’ve also learned that things we think are contradictory don’t necessarily have to be. It’s possible to love someone deeply and also know that you cannot be with them. For much of my life I think I believed love should somehow be enough. If two people really love each other then surely everything else can be figured out. I’m not sure I believe that anymore. Love can be completely real and still not solve incompatibility, circumstance, timing, or the ways two people move through the world. Accepting that doesn’t make the love less real. Maybe it allows love to simply be love without requiring it to become something else.
This brings me back to remembering.
Maybe remembering ourselves means learning to hear that quiet voice again. Maybe it means paying attention to what makes us curious, what makes us feel alive, what draws us toward something for no particular reason. Maybe we don’t need to constantly reinvent ourselves or become some better version of ourselves. Maybe some of the things we’re looking for have been there the entire time, buried underneath all the noise.
I don’t feel like I’m finding myself right now. I don’t really feel like I’m becoming someone new either. I feel like I’m remembering someone I already knew.
And I’m glad he’s still here.