Rediscovering Yourself

I drove out to Sedona to find myself again.

Finding yourself is something you end up doing over and over across a lifetime. You assume you already have a handle on who you are, and then one day you notice that the person you actually are doesn't match the picture in your head. Maybe you quietly turned into whatever version of yourself the world expected. The alternative is to sketch your own map and start walking, even if you can't see the destination, trusting that the freedom to choose the direction is yours to keep.

The goal is to meet the self you were supposed to become, the one that isn't handed to you by other people or circumstances. A lot of us can list everything we don't want without ever naming what we do want. That's a problem, because the unconscious mind only takes in positive statements. We burn through hours rehearsing what we're afraid of and rarely translate those fears into something we're moving toward. Afraid of being let down, we build defenses in advance, bracing to protect whatever we've grown attached to.

Plenty of us got the "don't get a big head" lecture as kids, and some of us kept hearing it as adults. That message sticks, and it makes self-promotion feel like something shameful. Men, for better or worse, tend to get more permission and more applause for building a reputation. Picture the respectable roles a man can collect over the years: head of the school board, the beloved family doctor, the preacher, the traveling evangelist, the dependable local businessman. People whose opinions carry weight.

Others among us were trained to take a seat and hand the spotlight to someone else. "Pride goeth before a fall," we were told. A man introduced as an expert often walks away with more credit than a woman with the same credentials. There's this unspoken math where, for a chosen few to shine, everyone else is expected to dim themselves down.

When self-confidence is that thin, it cracks easily. We slide into discouragement, put things off, and start treating failure as a foregone conclusion. There's no room at the inn for us, we decide, so we take the stable and call it fair. The wheels keep turning and the car never moves.

Every person matters, the same way every child does. Think about your grandchild, your son, your daughter. Weren't they perfect? The eyes, the nose, the little mouth. Everything they said or built or scribbled felt worth saving, worth remembering. So what changed for you? When exactly did you stop being that small, remarkable kid, nature's flawless handiwork?

Confidence and a bit of nerve keep you from getting cold feet right before you reach for what you want. The trouble is that most of us carry around a stubborn belief that we can't have it, so we quit wishing altogether and stop picturing a future we'd actually love.

Sometimes we narrow everything down to a single target, one we picked because it seemed respectable, or one that was picked for us, and we let it crowd out everything else. Go back to when you could wander into any corner of life, when your drawings or whatever you made were taken seriously instead of dismissed as a waste of time. Somewhere along the way you started grinding toward the one goal you'd decided was realistic, whether or not it had anything to do with what you loved.

The options are limitless if you're willing to believe they exist. Don't fence yourself in, and don't hand other people the fence posts. Are you the friend everyone enjoys having around because, next to you, their own lives look like a success? "Woe is me" can run on forever, and the people stuck listening to it eventually tune out. So when's the right time to go looking for who you really are? Right now.

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