The most difficult task in this life for a person is to understand one’s self. For all that you do, there’s an explanation, a story that it’s attached to it. You use this to justify everything that you do, but you are not necessarily aware that you are doing it.
In time, all the stories that you’ve told yourself start mixing together into your identity until you can no longer see what is reality and what is the story. By now, you have added so many stories on top of who you are that your core is no longer visible.
To reconnect to your true self you will have to peal the stories away one by one, just as you would do with an onion. Every story needs to be questioned, analyzed, and looked at from all sides. The purpose of this is to understand if the story is still useful for your development, or if it has become something malign, that is keeping you trapped.
To learn who you are, you first need to question who you think you are. With the first question that you ask yourself, the journey of self discovery starts. This process will never end, because there will always be something new that you will observe. With every discovery, you will become a new person, a version that is closer to how you are inside.
“I am who I am” is never a good explanation for the way you feel, act, and think, because it makes you believe that all you know now is all that you will ever know. You can always learn more, but you need to use the right questions.
There is always a reason for everything that you do, good or bad. The story you tell yourself is how you make sense of all that you need to do. In your head, all that you decide to say, do, or be, needs to align with who you are. The story does the aligning. Most times, what you tell yourself is not even true, but it helps justify your actions and your thoughts.
For a specific individual, good and bad are not the same as for all others, but the story that person uses needs to make sense. If the story doesn’t make sense, then the actions don’t make sense.
Many of the stories that fly inside your head are unknown to you because they were made up from pieces of information that don’t necessarily make sense together. These unknown stories, still influence who you are, and that is why you need to become more aware of the reasons behind why you do things.
If you keep ignoring the stories that get created in your mind, soon enough you’ll discover that your actions are not your own and that your thoughts no longer belong to you. You are nothing more than a handful of beliefs woven into countless stories that are supposed to help you make sense of the world, and live a good life.
What if those stories keep you trapped inside a life you no longer enjoy? What if all it takes to escape is to give up on some of the old stories and make room for some new ones?
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