Finding Myself - Beginning My Journey of Self-discovery

I've had enough of running.
I've had enough of living in fear.
I've had enough of dancing to another's tune.
I've had enough of losing myself for the sake of being accepted.

I want to be myself. I don't know exactly who I am just yet, but I want to find out, and then continue my life being true to the person I find deep within myself.

My first step of doing this was to look back as far back as I could to find something about myself that I could remember, something that I could recognize as 'me', and hold on to.
This wasn't easy. Most of us, myself included, endure so much in our lives - tumultuous event, one after another - that when we look back and really study our lives and what has become of it, finding out who we are at our core becomes one of the most difficult things to do.
We meet a variety of people, we get exposed to a host of beliefs and lifestyles, and we fight through one nightmare after the next, getting lost along the way. We lose ourselves to circumstances.
I was looking for myself, and I decided that it was best to look back at who I can remember myself being as a child. Even this task proved to be a difficult one, because many of us, even as kids, live through various kinds of traumas, and so what we find might not even be who we really are, but who we had to be to survive the lives we were born into. It's heart-breaking when the picture you find is a child, broken. It's a tough pill to swallow when you struggle to find the last point in your life where you could say you were happy - purely happy - especially when you'd expect that the child within you should have had that moment, yet did not.

After I discovered that I was born into a mess, I couldn't help but go through each one of them, one by one.
- that when we look back and really study our lives and what has become of it, finding out who we are at our core becomes one of the most difficult things to do.

We meet a variety of people, we get exposed to a host of beliefs and lifestyles, and we fight through one nightmare after the next, getting lost along the way. We lose ourselves to circumstances.

I was looking for myself, and I decided that it was best to look back at who I can remember myself being as a child. Even this task proved to be a difficult one, because many of us, even as kids, live through various kinds of traumas, and so what we find might not even be who we really are, but who we had to be to survive the lives we were born into. It's heart-breaking when the picture you find is a child, broken. It's a tough pill to swallow when you struggle to find the last point in your life where you could say you were happy - purely happy - especially when you'd expect that the child within you should have had that moment, yet did not.

 

After I discovered that I was born into a mess, I couldn't help but go through each one of them, one by one.

At some points, I wondered exactly what I did to deserve the life I was made to live.

I cried for the child who got torn apart by the world, and then allowed myself to get angry about it.

I think that every one of us will find things in our lives that make no sense, and that should not have happened to us, or anybody else for that matter; but they did, and it’s in reviewing, going over it, analysing how it made us feel, and how it could have changed certain aspects of who we were as people, that also allows us to become bigger than our individual pasts, and make the necessary changes to become better, healthier people in our daily lives.

It is in our moments of recognition and that kind of enlightenment into our souls that provide us with that push to change the direction of our lives, so we can stop being the poison in our own lives, as well as in the lives of others, because who we are is what we offer to the world around us.

 

I could not dwell. I could not live in what I had become any longer.

I was a slave to my past. I put up walls that blocked out what could have been fantastic opportunities and fruitful relationships, based on what I had gone through.

I met wonderful people, but because I had been hurt, rejected, mistreated and disappointed by all the people before, I didn’t trust. I created barriers that allowed interaction and closeness only up until a certain point, at which point I would shut down, and either create a distance that made growth impossible, or cause enough problems that would send the other person running. I followed this pattern over and over again until it became something that controlled my life. Upon meeting a new person, I would put up a façade so that I would know everything about the next person, but that person would know nothing about who I really was. I refused to show weakness or vulnerability when that was all that I was. I ended up being lonely.

The few people I did allow myself to get close to I clung to, and in doing so, morphed myself into whatever they needed me to be so that I was sure that they wouldn’t leave me, which was inevitably the failing of those relationships because I could not be who I truly was, ending up hating myself.

The insecurity I felt about who I was affected my life in much the same way. I did not believe that I was capable of being the person I knew in my heart I could be or doing what I knew I could do.

I settled for less because I was scared that I would disappoint not others who gave me the opportunities, but myself. I couldn’t be the person to disappoint myself when that was all that I knew about others.

This was when I started burning things.

 

We each have something that we do, talents we were born with. My ‘something’ has always been writing.

I got a notebook and started writing. I wrote to every last person who hurt me. I wrote about everything that damaged me.

I think that even if writing is not your ‘something’, it is still therapeutic. To get out what’s deep inside, not thinking, but just writing and writing until it feels like all that pain is out there on the page, is a release.

After I finished writing it all, I burned it. I set fire to the pain, to the bad memories, to the people who hurt me, and watched as the anguish I had suffered disappeared into nothing but a pile of black ash that I then blew away into the air for the wind to take wherever it went.

 

I cried and cried. I cried until I got a headache.

I took a long bath, washing away the old, letting the drain suck up all the dirtiness from the life I was walking away from.

I got a new notebook, and started writing about who I want to be.

I will always be the person that I am- bubbly at times, but mostly quiet; a deep thinker, optimistic, fascinated by small things like the smell of the earth when the sun has not come out yet, sensitive; but the past will no longer control me, and I will be who I am in the life that I am creating for myself.

 

We cannot help for or change what the world has handed us up until this point, but we can decide what we are willing to accept, and we have the power and capacity to make the conscious decision to change what we are unhappy about.

 

We need to be gentle with ourselves as we discover who exactly we are.

As we work our way towards stronger versions of ourselves, we should take the opportunities given to us gratefully, accept the gift of people sent our way, and be vigilant about how everything makes us feel. We should evaluate and process our thoughts and emotions each step of the way so that we know what works for us as individuals and what doesn’t, and also importantly, why  we feel what we feel when we feel how feel, because knowing ourselves is vital to have an enriching life.

 

The truth is that we can only offer the world the wonder within ourselves when we ourselves know the wonder within ourselves.