WRITE NOW THERAPY!

It starts early. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Then it’s “What are you going to do after you graduate from high school?” So much pressure for someone who is under eighteen and still with over 80% of their life to live.

It may not get easier after that. Maybe you find the career you chose as a youngster isn’t all you thought it would be. Perhaps, college didn’t work out like you had hoped. Maybe you are unhappy in the career path and still can’t figure out what you want to do for the rest of your life.

I’m sure there are some people out there who knew what they wanted to be when they were a kid and it was a solid path through high school and college and even after that. They became what they set out to be from an early age and it was a clear path through the rest of their lives. What it must feel like to be  those people.

Personally, I wouldn’t know and I’m figuring you are the same way.  For most of the us the path of life has detours, dead ends, wrong ways and traffic on the road to purpose. Sometimes the older we get the more confusing it gets and some times it can become more painful. Our escape vices in life usually come about somewhere in our life when things don’t seem to be going as easily as we had hoped or planned.

Finding what we are supposed to do in our lives can be complicated. That complication usually develops because deep down we don’t really know who we are. Life has made our “being” a complicated mass because everything that we have seen or learned in life is pointing us in a different direction and us being ourselves becomes hard.

WHO ARE YOU?

Years of experience has taught us to be cautions with who we really are for fear of rejection. In order to fit in we bury our unique self below the surface and eventually that self gets buried so deep inside us we cannot even see who that person is anymore.

This buried self usually starts in middle school or high school where standing out can get you attention you don’t want. Blending in is easier in those teen years because we learn through our own experiences or those we witness that standing out can get you attention you don’t want. So we begin doing everything we can to blend – how we look, what we say, how we act becomes a reflection of those around us. Conformity can be a comforting place during those teen years.

CONFORMITY IS COMFORTABLE BUT NO REAL

Conformity is a pattern that we see works in the world. Social media, traditional media, and society-at-large continues to feed that beast of conformity until it becomes so much of who we outwardly are that we begin to compartmentalize our life into the reflections of a person certain people want us to in life. The person we are for our parents, our friends, our co-workers, our boss, our church friends, our guy or girl friends, we find we are splintering ourselves into different versions of the same self that may bare little resemblance to the person we have trapped deep inside of us.

Our outward appearing self can feel like a lie to who we are or want to be inside but it is the only way we know how to cope in our life. The separation between our core self (the one deep inside) and our outward-appearing self creates an identity crisis of various proportions depending on how deep we have pushed the person we know we are and should be below the surface.

Who we are inside and what we want to do with our lives are linked. They can be linked in a simple way like those who know what they want to be when they are young and become that person in life. They can also be linked like a spider web of self-identity that fractures what we want to be when we grow up. Like a web going off in all different directions and backtracking itself over parallel lines and intersection, our lives and identity can’t figure out which way it wants to go.

AM I ON THE RIGHT PATH?

Those of us in the second group struggle with finding direction and purpose and any little bump in the road leads us to believe we are on the wrong path. Maybe you didn’t get into the school you wanted to or get the job you wanted. Maybe you chose a career path because someone else told you to or you did it because everyone around you was doing it. Maybe you just don’t know what you want to do because you really don’t know who you are.

Knowing what you want to do with your life and what purpose you want to serve is anchored by who you really are. I’m betting that you don’t know what do to do with your life because you don’t know who you really are in life. You have splintered who you are so finely that the real you has become hard to find.

In order to give your life meaning and a direction, you need to figure out who you really are. I know. I’m sorry that is not an easy task to complete. Or maybe you are quick to say I know who I am, this is who I am. If you are thinking that, then I ask you if you know who you are why is it so difficult to find your way forward in a direction that makes sense? Is it because you are a person that the world has told you to be and you aren’t really you?

The greatest obstacle in life is in defining who we are clearly and honestly without the direct influence of others. Yes, its true we cannot separate ourselves completely from the influence of others. However, our truest self often lies below the surface. It may be a person we know we are and hide it from the rest of the world for one reason or another. Aligning yourself with who your true, best self is, can go along way in you figuring out what direction to take your life in.

I invite you to click on one of the links below and prepare yourself to find your true self, your identity and your purpose. The goal here is meant to be life changing. As a mental health professional, I work with individual clients on exercises like below with the goal of finding the person in them they want to be and creating a path to success in their identity quest. The links to the articles and exercises below can help you do that.