“You’ve always been yourself; it’s just that you lose sight of who you are by letting in all kinds of outside influences and opinions – influences that seem to define you more than who you’ve always been on the inside. But if you trust that you can do the things you want to do, then you can do anything. Furthermore, you can be yourself courageously and wholeheartedly.”
~ Merette van Hijfte
Some time ago, drunk on sentiment from the past, I walked into a freshly opened gym for the first time in nearly two years.
Being an ex-gymrat, I loved every bit of it: the smell of fresh bumper plates, the taste of overstimulated pre-workout, and the clanking of iron. But afterwards, standing in the parking lot, I felt like a total alien; an absolute stranger to myself.
Two years prior, such a place had been my second home. I’d made friends there, worked there, and kindled a passion for physicality that I’d cherish for the rest of my life. The gym had helped me through some of my darkest hours, and when the world didn’t make sense to me, it had been the only place that still did.
But as always, life moves, changes, morphs into new forms, expressions and desires.
For long, life outside the gym had started feeling like an empty shell: boring, familiar, repetitive, and barren of any meaningful growth. Nothing of what I did felt like it really mattered, nothing felt “alive” anymore.
So, at 28 years old, Merette and I rolled the existential dice and made a change: we cut with anything that was familiar, migrated to the other side of the globe, got married, designed a house, drafted up a meaningful mission, started a business, got a puppy dachshund, and explored existential courage by walking the Camino de Santiago entirely backwards.
Such changes demand sacrifice, and the gym, alongside a part of myself that I identified with for so many years, ended up on the altar of change. And even though life’s been an amazing adventure ever since, this part of my former life kept feeling blatantly absent, silently fuelling a romantic longing to dig up parts of the past.
So, when I heard the news that a gym was opening some 20 minutes away from where we lived, I felt that the reunification with a former-glory-Self was imminent. But after I was done, it became very clear:
This. Wasn’t. It.
As I drove home, I wondered how to find myself again and how we in general can prevent ourselves from losing touch with who we truthfully are. Now I know this gym story sounds somewhat silly, but it actually uncovers a painful insight about the situations in which you feel you’ve become a stranger to yourself:
Whenever you feel like you’ve lost yourself, longing for the past hasn’t anything to do with nostalgia or romanticism and everything to do with avoidance.
Avoidance of the present moment, avoidance of who we actually are, avoidance of the results of our choices, and the natural necessity for us to invent and re-invent ourselves over and over again.
In this piece, we’ll focus on how you can find yourself again in a genuine, autonomous, and honest way. Let’s dive into it.
Key takeaways:
- There is no past to recover, only the present to regain.
- Growth happens when you allow pain to breathe.
- Nobody will hand you an answer externally.
- Everything is always changing, and so are you.
1. There is no past to recover, only the present to regain
When you’re feeling like a stranger to yourself, it’s easy to think as if there is something you have lost along the way. But let’s think of it in a different light: Maybe, you simply haven’t met yourself in the present moment in a while – and probably for good reasons that only you know.
Perhaps you’re dealing with a difficult personal situation, drastic life changes, a bad break-up, or the loss of someone close to you. No matter what you’re currently dealing with, and no matter how painful it may be, avoiding the present moment will have you slowly drifting away from yourself.
To put this in yet another different light: Being present also translates to a heightened sense of self-honesty:
- The honesty to acknowledge your internal questions.
- The honesty to acknowledge your current situation.
- The honesty to acknowledge all of your feelings.
When life feels like a party, being present is obviously the easier thing to do. But when shit hits the existential fan, this honesty becomes a difficult, and sometimes painful thing to do.
But even so, by acknowledging your experience of the present moment in both good and bad times, you’ll stay close to yourself and to who or what you genuinely are.
Ultimately, you are alive here, right now, in this very moment – and it is in this moment, right now, where you’ll find yourself throughout all stages of your life.
The flight into past times is essentially avoiding this reality. But even so, those past times point to the same logic. Think back to a period that was “the golden era” of your life. A time when you experienced flow, vigorous energy, enjoying each and every day.
Whatever may have been the situation back then, it’s easy to place those past activities, situations or people on a pedestal as the causes of your happiness. But essentially, they’re nothing but a result of something deeper at play: they’re the fruits of a relentless engagement with the present moment.
Today, your present moment has changed: you’re a different person, walking a different path, facing different challenges. Hence, if we are to start finding ourselves again, we are most likely to encounter ourselves in the present moment – something that demands you to acknowledge whatever you’re faced with.
To do so requires courage, curiosity, and a non-judgemental look at yourself and your happenstance. From here, you can truthfully meet yourself again, and eventually re-invent the person who you are today.
Now, that sounds pretty easy. So why, then, do we so often choose to avoid ourselves and our situations instead? Because living in truth requires a big dose of courage, for the present moment is also the keeper of things we’d rather wish to avoid – regret, grief, anger, desperation – why face all of that, whereas we can also simply distract ourselves?
2. Face your pain before it takes hold of you
Like a deer grazing majestically in the wild, we find ourselves at the mercy of nature and fate.
When the deer is one day attacked and barely escapes with her life, her body overflows with adrenaline and trauma. But then the next day, she’s back on her feet and gracefully roaming the same field in which she nearly lost her life the day prior.
How is that possible? And why does it matter? Because inside the story of the deer, we find one of nature’s many wonders – one that can liberate us from our paralysing tendency to suppress our pain.
After the deer has outrun the danger, it finds a safe place, lays down, and starts to tremble violently. According to psychologist Peter Levine, who spent decades studying this phenomenon, the shaking discharges the survival energy the body mobilised during moments of danger.1 Once it’s done shaking, the deer goes back out roaming the wild, as peacefully as ever.
The story of the deer serves as a wonderful metaphor for the necessity of facing your pain before it takes hold of you: when you sit with yourself, face the present moment and fully acknowledge your inner world, you’ll notice how all the scary things roaming the depths of your being start to come out. In that moment, they’re given a chance to be seen and heard for the first time, sometimes for the first time in decades. And as they’re finally allowed to simply exist, they’re allowed to be processed.
Hence, as blissful as being present makes itself seem to be, encountering yourself, including all the things roaming your personal abyss, can be an extremely painful manoeuvre, which is exactly the point. If we are to move through our lives as majestically as a deer in the wild, we have to be able to sit with ourselves.
It is through the process of acknowledging all the things that are part of you, including the ones you’d rather avoid, that you enable yourself to let go of what no longer serves you.
From here, you can re-invent who you are, free from the weight of your past, and realise your existential freedom: the starting place for making authentic choices.
This brings us to the third spoke of our quest to find ourselves again: to accept our capacity for authentic choice, and to resist the trap of inauthenticity.
3. Water
Back when I was practicing Chi-Kung, I had a teacher whom I’ll never forget. In this particular period, I felt pretty lost in life, desperate for guidance. One day, when the semester’s evaluations were due, I had written about 4 pages of text about my progress in class, hungry and eager to learn.
After we’d have written our self-reflection report, we’d receive the feedback of our teacher. When I was given the report by my teacher, eager to learn and hoping for extensive feedback, I was dumbfounded to find what was inside the report: just a single word, sitting comfortably inside a sea of white, blank space.
“Water.”
Some of the greatest teachers in my life didn’t teach by handing out answers or remedies. In fact, they did the opposite. Their teachings showed primarily in what they didn’t say, leaving breadcrumbs that invited me to find my own ways of being.
In other words, their teachings made authentic growth happen from the inside out, not the other way around.
This connects to what it means to foster authenticity. If we are to be the true governors of ourselves, it is up to us to tend to our gardens, eradicate the weeds, and plant new seeds. It is this capability – being able to tend to your own garden, even when you’re unsure what the hell you’re doing – that allows for authentic, autonomous growth that is (eventually) capable of governing and creating itself. So why does this have anything to do with finding yourself again?
Because nobody externally can hand you the remedy for rediscovering yourself.
Of course, we can all find mentors, therapists, coaches or friends that give us great advice. But ultimately, you cannot make a horse drink. You can only guide it to a pool of “water”.
When you’re in personal distress, it’s easy to dismiss your own inner world, hoping to find something or someone who can hand you a remedy externally. After all, if your interior being feels barren of meaning and riddled with pain, what’s the point of going there?
Here, we risk falling into the trap of inauthenticity: to avoid the inner distress that is asking for our attention, and to instead, make inauthentic choices in the hopes of avoiding what we actually need to face.
Modern society has made the flight from personal distress extremely easy. Steven Pressfield, in his book The War of Art, describes modern society as a giant distraction machine:
“What makes it tricky is that we live in a consumer culture
that’s acutely aware of [this] unhappiness and has massed all its
profit-seeking artillery to exploit it. By selling us a product, a
drug, a distraction.“2
Alas, we all get distracted. But once we take the path of self-avoidance more than regularly, that path becomes the default path, worn smooth by repetition. Meanwhile, the path towards authenticity becomes the overgrown, strange, scary, and untraveled one.
The French-Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre labelled this neglecting of our authentic, radical freedom as acting out bad faith (“mauvaise foi”3) – the act whereby you act inauthentically by adopting false values and disowning your freedom as a sentient human being:
“I cannot do anything about it, this is just who I am.”
“It’s always been like that, I have no choice.”
“X or Y made me do Z.”
Luckily, no matter how far on the inauthentic path we’ve travelled, we can always take a left turn, back onto the path of authenticity.
4. Everything is always changing, and so are you
I have to change to stay the same
~ Willem de Kooning
Whereas you were once A, you are now AB, enabled with newfound life-experience. Tomorrow, you’ll be AB and C. So what’s the point of going back to being only ‘A’?
In my attempt to re-find myself again by going back to that Panama gym, I found that this old version of myself no longer exists. And even though I’m not entirely sure if there are rules to this game of life, here’s one that I found, inside that parking lot: the only constant, is change itself.
I had made a change by creating a new life for myself, one that demanded me to be present, which also translates to facing all the things which were not working. The remedy was never archeology, nor was it acting as if chasing your dreams is without pain or disappointment.
In fact, it is to embrace the not-knowing, to acknowledge that pain is inherent to the path of change, and to genuinely sit with myself, meet the present moment, and start the process of re-inventing myself from there. To take a left turn, back onto the path of authenticity, can be a rocky road at times – but that is okay.
If anything, we are something that is always becoming, dissolving, growing, breaking down again, learning, and layering itself, over and over and over again. And this, while distressing, is in itself a beautiful thing.
The one and only thing that genuinely helps you find yourself again, is the courage to embrace this terrifying reality: That you only encounter yourself in the present moment, that pain will always exist, and that this acknowledgement allows you to be authentic, alive, and full of energy once more.
There really is no past-Self to re-discover, only the present-Self to regain.
If you’re keen for more, we’ve developed a method that is exactly about finding back your authentic self again. You can learn more on the Same Method here.
- Levine, Peter A. 1997. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. ↩︎
- The War Of Art (2002), Steven Pressfield ↩︎
- Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2003. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel Estella Barnes. 2nd ed. Routledge Classics. London, England: Routledge. ↩︎
