How Well Do You Know Yourself?

Who are you, really? From the moment we arrive, no two of us start out the same. But what happens to us along the way keeps editing the picture we hold of ourselves, sometimes quietly, sometimes all at once.

As children, we rarely have the tools to push back. The people around us assume we'll turn out something like them, and when you're small, you tend to take that assumption as fact. You absorb it before you can question it.

Each of us carries a different mix of potential, and that mix points toward why we're here. The trouble is finding the time to notice it. So much of a day gets eaten by other people's demands that the question of who we are on the inside barely gets a hearing.

A lot of us end up occupied with the version of life we think we're supposed to be living. We check the boxes someone else drew. Meanwhile the talents and abilities that are actually ours, the ones tied to whatever purpose we have, go unused.

You can see the pressure of that gap surface at different ages. For some it erupts in a teenager's rebellion. For others it arrives as the restlessness of a midlife crisis. And there are people who don't bump into the question at all until retirement is staring back at them.

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