Road to Self Discovery

About a year ago I set out on a self love journey and immediately found that I had a hard time learning to love myself because I realized I had no real understanding of exactly who I was. Of course I knew the basics like my favorite colors and foods, but when it came down to really figuring out exactly what my personal beliefs and values were, I drew nothing but blanks.

Like most kids I adapted the beliefs and values instilled in me by my parents and whenever I heard something that conflicted with those values I took it with a grain of salt. Doing this became increasingly more difficult as I grew into a young adult and started forming opinions based on my own observations. Whenever I started openly questioning the truths passed down to me by my parents, I was always met with some sort of resistance and in order to keep the peace I began to keep my thoughts and ideas to myself. Keeping these new budding ideas to myself was probably one of the worst things I have ever done because, in doing so, I was stunting my own development. It is perfectly natural and extremely important for us to question things. The questions you ask dictate the knowledge you acquire and having knowledge is what gives you the ability to form opinions and beliefs. You can’t decide what you think if you aren’t sure of what you know. The more I prevented myself from questioning authority and the generally accepted truth, the less I developed into my own person, and the more I became a mirror of my surroundings. It’s no wonder I had no idea who I really was.

The first step in my road to self discovery was deciding to allow myself to exist freely. Instead of filtering my thoughts and actions to fall in line with my upbringing and what is socially acceptable, I began to think about the things I wanted to think about and act the way I wanted to act without judging myself for doing so. This, in my opinion, was the most important step. We often cast away ideas because we feel that we are weird for thinking the things we think. The same applies to our actions. We act differently at home and around loved ones than we do around the general public out of fear of not being accepted or being labeled “strange”. Sometimes a moderate filter is very much needed, but many times it is limiting. If you are constantly moderating the things you do and say to please others you are allowing yourself to live by their standards and stripping yourself of what makes you unique. If a person is defined by what they believe and how they act but their actions and thoughts are controlled by what others deem acceptable, what does it say about that person?

Once I began to exist without judging myself using society’s standards I started to really get to know who I was and slowly but surely I began to love the person I was becoming. You have to know who you are in order to know how you feel about yourself. Now that I have a better idea of who I am, I can truly say I love myself and enjoy my own company more than I enjoy most things. Much to my surprise, other people have begun to love me too. Granted, I lost a few friends during this process, but it turns out that for the most part people love genuine people and ironically, it was the approval of my peers that served as confirmation that I was doing the right thing. While I loved getting the outside recognition, their approval wasn’t my motivation to continue on my path. It was the empowering feeling of finally being my own person. It’s a feeling I want everyone to experience because it is one of the things I believe makes life worth living.