Self-discovery

Don’t spend so much time trying to figure yourself out and. Pondering and ruminating on where you fit in and the kind of person that you are.

Give yourself some credit and remember that you aren’t so simple that you fit into a neat box or that you’re easy to label.

You’re complex and ever-evolving.

There is comfort in being able to say I’m this kind of person and this is what I like . But often when we do that we don’t give ourselves room to grow. The last thing you want is is to end up boxed into limitations of your own making.

Go out and explore yourself, what does it mean to be you? It might be strange and beautiful but that’s okay.

You might find that you’re a juxtaposition of messy and particular, simple and complex, a painter and a scientist, there’s endless possibilities and it would be a shame to never find out.

According to the dictionary app on my phone self-discovery is ‘The learning of what kind of person one really is, or what one really wants to do with ones life’.

I think that is something worth pursuing.

You might not be who you think you are

From a young age we start to develop an identity, a sense of self.

This is influenced by a variety of factors such as family, friends, books, music, religion, TV and film.

And so we go around living our lives with an identity of who we are. But it’s often much more complex than that.

As humans, having a sense of self is important to our development because life is easier when you know yourself.

But in a rush to reach that knowing we often end up skipping the pivotal exploration period of really delving in and asking the question of who am I?

So we settle for what influences us a combination of what we see and what people tell us to be. We end up thinking that that is who we are when their is a whole other self to be explored.

Settlers and explorers

Some people choose to settle because they want a life of comfort, stability and familiarity. Or maybe it’s that they’ve figured out what they want from life or what they want to pursue.

Some people choose to explore because they have trust in the part of them that is curious to experience more in life and enjoy they the constant newness that comes with the explorers way of life.

Sometimes settlers become explorers when they realise how little they have experienced or when they gain this hunger for more.

Sometimes explorers become settlers when they grow tired of going from place to place or thing to thing and they feel fulfilled by what they have experienced.

Fear might hold you back from branching out and trying something new. But, as good as life might seem, you may find that it is just the sense of comfort that you crave not the life you’re currently living.

Or perhaps you choose the life of a wanderer because you crave the feeling of freedom. But you might just be running from something and it’s easy to make excuses when live your life in a way so that you’re constantly unsettled.

I think for me a mix of the 2 is necessary because you can gain so much from both ways of living.

Aspects of self

Growing up in watched a lot of TV and became really interested in characters, how we define ourselves and labels.

I think that is where my interest in people, the human experience and eventually social science came from.

I grew up trying to figure out who I was and what labels fit me. I was constantly trying to put myself in a box thinking that this would be the best way to understand myself.

But it didn’t work. We’re much more complex than we give ourselves credit.

Over time I find myself regularly discovering new aspects of myself. Some of them fit the story I used to tell myself of who I am and others don’t.

But unlike in the past I’m no longer trying to fit into boxes, I’m actually willing to explore myself and my humanness and all the aspects of self that I discover along the way.