‘Finding yourself’ is not really how it works. You aren’t a ten-dollar bill in last winter’s coat pocket. You are also not lost. Your true self is right there, buried under cultural conditioning, other people’s opinions, and inaccurate conclusions you drew as a kid that became your beliefs about who you are. “Finding yourself” is actually returning to yourself. An unlearning, an excavation, a remembering who you were before the world got its hands on you.
―Emily McDowell
It is a process that involves breaking down – shedding layers that do not serve us in our lives and don’t reflect who we really are.
Yet, it also involves a tremendous act of building up – recognizing who we want to be and passionately going about fulfilling our unique destiny – whatever that may be. It’s a matter of recognizing our personal power, yet being open and vulnerable to our experiences. It isn’t something to fear or avoid, berating ourselves along the way, but rather something to seek out with the curiosity and compassion we would have toward a fascinating new friend.
You can’t know what the perfect path will be, you can’t know what the perfect you should be, you can’t know what your purpose in life is until it starts to uncover itself. You can’t know your destination until you get there. So instead of spinning your wheels with the unknowable, focus on what you actually have right in front of you. … There is a crazy amount of beauty to be noticed here if you pay attention before it slips away. This is the practice. It isn’t easy. It isn’t certain. It is beautiful.
–Leo Babauta
My view is that life is largely dictated by our beliefs. It is the experiences we live and the emotional interpretations we give to them that determine the image we will build of ourselves and therefore condition the possibility of giving rise to certain behaviors rather than others.
However, it is legitimate to think that each of us is born with a full potential of behaviors, all possible and viable and start working on ourselves. Work takes effort, but it allows us to explore and exploit our full potential.
In other words, we can educate ourselves on an approach, a path that leads us to explore every facet of who we can and want to be, a work of growth and continuous improvement that starts from the assumption that we do not accept being as we do not like to be.