Who? Me?
Have you ever sat down and tried to work out who you actually are? I have. Mostly it left me confused, or feeling like I'd come up short somehow.
Accepting ourselves, and the people around us, as we really are matters. In my training as a psychologist I've gone through a pile of personality theories. Each one carves people into different types, names them, explains where the traits came from, and claims to predict how a person will behave.
Take the introvert and extrovert split. I've been both, at different points. As a small kid I hid behind my mother's skirt. These days I speak up more freely and spend less energy worrying about what anyone thinks of me. I'm just me now, and I don't bend that shape to fit the room. I'll change when I find a reason worth changing for, and not before.
I've also built my own yardstick for measuring myself as a person, and I've found habits that pushed me toward the version I wanted to be. One side effect I'm not proud of: it's made me judgmental. I generally disapprove of that in myself, and I struggle to understand why other people see things so differently, why we don't always agree or get on.
There's also the question of why I'm vulnerable to certain things, why I keep walking into the same mistakes again and again. Lately I think I'm starting to see it. For years I poked around in astrology, the metaphysical side of it, and never got a handle on the thing. Other people take to it easily. They pull answers out of it that I could never reach.
So I'm going to look into something called Human Design, from Karen Parker. It draws on astrology but frames it in a way I haven't encountered before, and there might be something there worth digging into.