If you're looking to find yourself, chances are you're probably not all that lost to begin with.
That nebulous search to find the best version of you with a purpose in this universe? I've been there. I've gone on a "finding myself" journey of reinvention ... or five. I've checked everything off the list. I've undergone a massive career change, abandoned religion, run a few marathons, lost 90 pounds, lived abroad, and I've even taken up yoga. Namaste, mother fuckers.
The long-term results of these endeavors? I can stand in Warrior Three and I have a new career that I'm definitely happier with, but the real takeaways have been a lot of subtle things that I probably don't quite notice.
The punch line — finding yourself in self-help books and affirmations is bullshit. Becoming who you are, full of slowly acquired wisdom and life lessons, is a continuous process not to be neglected and then crammed in like you're trying to survive your final exams. At 32, I've been living my life (maybe five of them at this point) actively trying to figure it out. Though each chapter has added to the book, one scene hasn't staged the whole story. Do you think the missing chapter for your completion is in a marathon or a trip abroad?
It's not. Let me tell you why.
You are yourself at any weight.
I've done the "I'm turning 30 so I should check a marathon off the bucket list" thing. Hi, Mom, I'm a cliché!
Well, almost.
I became very sick in my mid-20s. I got the worst headache of my life one day and it never went away (and yes, I tried Excedrin). Persistent headaches are very difficult for neurologists to treat. The first eight months of treatment were a game of "throw something at the wall and see what sticks," so I had the worst headache of my life every day for eight months until something started really working.
I was also very overweight. So I thought, Maybe I should tackle this other health stuff. I started eating healthier and hitting the gym. Within the first year of working out, I ran a half marathon. A year later, I ran a marathon, then an ultra marathon, a grueling event longer than a marathon (runners are not known for sanity). I'd found religion and prayed at the altar of lost toenails.
After a long life of being the fat chick, I was a size 6 and a marathoner. People say marathons don't just tone up your glutes, but they change your life forever. As a person who now woke up and thought about running, my diet, my training, I thought I'd found myself.
Then one day, I couldn't run.
I permanently injured my hip. And apparently I had scoliosis. Problems kept stacking up. Running was over. This led to the epiphany that my health issues were connected. I had Ehlers Danlos syndrome, which, in rare cases, presents with a headache. It wasn't even the fat on my thighs that was causing the pain on my face (though I'm healthier for losing it); I was just a ticking time bomb.
Eventually the headaches were controlled with the right meds. And through the running, I learned that I could physically push myself to do tremendous things even in a lot of pain, but having the running taken away from me brought me to a realization; I'm much more than my reflection in my sweat puddle. It carved out something new in me, but there was more to me when running was over.
You are yourself with or without a deity.
I was raised religious and at some point, while discussing the nature of the universe over a guitar with a heroin-smoking Scottish playwright friend, I stopped believing. There's a strange thing that happens when you lose faith; some of us look for something new to be a touchstone in our lives. I was too broke to take up expensive cars, a drug habit, or eating organic. But I delved deeper into this new world of morality and goodness without religion.
I skipped the metaphysical bullshit in The Secret and read every atheist author I could get my hands on. I thought deeply about the nature of the universe, why we're here, where our morality comes from without a God. I ate up every article I could on the hypocrisy of my former religion, how many religions borrow their dogmas from each other, and that this great big "God" idea really can't be proven.
I became that obnoxious friend for a while, that proselytizing atheist who couldn't get through a conversation in which religion was mentioned without letting you know that your faith was wrong.
I was a dick.
In losing religion, I thought I'd found myself, or at least something vital about myself. Really, I'd fallen prey to what a lot of people do when they lose one set of beliefs. A new belief shows up to replace the void of the old with just as much fervor, even if the new dogma is simply a lack of dogma.
I'd spent so long immersed in the idea that God can't be proven to exist. The converse, that God can't disproven, is equally true. I'm still not religious, but I also realize that most religious people aren't the extremists, and they're not out to support extremists either. They just want to head to church (temple, mosque, or prayer circle) once in awhile, and go back to looking at funny pictures of cats on the Internet.
You know, just like atheists.
I found where I stand philosophically on this issue, but I also found compassion for people who saw this deeply different from me. Did I find myself? It was the gateway for my skepticism, but I found that I was pretty much the same person without religion that I had been with it.
But if we really want to discuss religion, I didn't even discover I was a Mac person for at least another five years.
You are yourself when you're somewhere else.
I didn't travel to find myself, but I did gain perspective when I moved to England in my early 20s for graduate school. I was scared to leave home and cried my first night there knowing I wouldn't be home for three months. As an American living in England, I embraced that my accent was a beacon for every question that people had about the U.S. It was 2006 and the Iraq War was at a particularly messy point. People had preconceptions and questions, and admittedly, so did I.
When I finally did go home after three months, I realized that I had developed an accent, but not a bloody hell-fit-smart-clever British accent wrought with the native Britishisms. My accent was being slowly worn away, and my friends' American accents sounded vaguely foreign to me on my first trip across the pond. While grad school was exhausting me and filling my brain, my temporary home was also changing me in little ways.
I traveled around Europe a bit and assimilated into my new home. I practiced my French with my housemates. I embraced pub culture. But I also learned that some preconceptions that we just accept as true in America were … misconceptions. I had a friend there who was sure I knew about a tiny town in Texas just outside of Austin. It was the geographic equivalent of him, a Brit, knowing every tiny town just outside of Berlin. It's anecdotal, but enough of these anecdotes taught me that we all have misconceptions of what happens outside our borders. I have a Canadian aunt (whom I love dearly) who was sure my brother was going to commute home on the weekends from a temporary job in Missouri to NH. She could surely tell you all the capitals of the Canadian provinces, but she's just not American, so why would she know?
I left with a master's degree in forensics and an appreciation for how similar people are no matter how geographically disparate. The "me" that had it to leave home, write a thesis, and let go of the life I'd known without a net was still there.
I just had a few more passport stamps and a better résumé.
You're more than your job, even a good one.
When I landed my last gig as an analytical chemist, I was sure this was the job I'd have for life. It wasn't just good pay and benefits, I woke up in the morning looking forward to seeing my coworkers and taking on the scientific challenges of the day.
And then a few things happened. I started a blog dedicated to the destruction of bad science. It gained a steady following over the initial few months. It was a really fun hobby, a great place for my love of writing, dirty jokes, and science. The following was picking up fast enough that I felt like it might turn it into a career in a few years.
The company where I worked was having a rough year financially. The week that I found out I wasn't surviving the year-end round of downsizing, a lit agent reached out to me and asked if I wanted to write a book. I was shattered about the job, but I had two options. One was to live on my small savings for a few months, try to make my website turn into a job, and get to work on a book proposal. The other was let it continue to be a hobby while polishing my résume.
I walked away from a few job offers and took the gamble on my website.
And then a miracle happened. An editor found my blog and reached out to me, asking if I'd like to write an article on the Food Babe. It was my first professional piece of writing, and it went nutty viral. It changed not just my career, but my life. I was flying back from my first big talk (and I was so nervous about talking to 500 people), and I saw the count on my article hit 1 million views in six hours. I was getting hundreds of emails per day, juggling media requests, and just trying desperately to stick the landing.
My life and my career changed forever that week.
I'm going to be intrinsically tied to my career as SciBabe, probably forever, at this point.
But did I "find myself" in becoming SciBabe? I don't think so.
I'm not "SciBabe." I'm Yvette. SciBabe is my job, the collection of skills that I have as a funny person, a scientist, and a communicator who knows how people are reached via social media (hint: it's dick jokes). It's the perfect job for me, and I think about it with almost an obsessive fervor. But at a certain point in the day, I shut my lap off, hang out with my boyfriend, my friends, my silly little dog, and I remember that I'm still me with other interests.
It's the best damn job I could have. But I didn't become me the day my article went viral.
You already are yourself.
A lot of people start a new year and try to reinvent themselves. They'll pick up a self-help book, try to drop weight, learn a new language, go on that trip that they always meant to, and this is all an attempt to find something deep in themselves that was either already there or that they need to tack onto themselves for completion.
If you have enough stability and money for vacation, yoga classes, healthy (sometimes expensive) food, and every useless self-help book on the market, you're already doing a lot better than you probably think. I'm not saying this to dismiss the internal crisis that kicks off a journey of self-discovery, but if you're not told that you're broken, how else would you be sold on needing to fix everything about yourself? Finding Yourself Inc., the industry that wants to hand you an instantly improved you, always has the answer. Find enlightenment on a weekend retreat with organic food, grounding exercises, stretching, self-help, and guided spirituality with your new friends away from the corporate monstrosity of your life for three easy payments of only $99.99. Plus tax.
You will not become yourself in that weekend. You'll learn some ways to relax. You'll maybe catch up on some sleep. But goddamn it, a guru is not the key to becoming a person you already were.
Being discontent with your life and wanting to change something? That's legit. But an instant personality makeover is bullshit. Changing who you are takes time and sometime involves deep examination through therapy with a professional. Changing some things about your life — even big things — also doesn't negate the years of building up who you were. It doesn't destroy your DNA, the scars of being the fat kid, the memories of being on your high school math team, the trauma of losing your first love, every joke that ever made you laugh (even the really filthy ones that you don't want to admit made you laugh), the time your parents first caught you looking at porn, the first year you lived away from home, the sex that you enjoyed, the sex that you regretted. They're all a part of what got you to right now.
You can change. But change knowing that you're maybe adding a little, maybe subtracting a little, but you're not starting from scratch. All the things I've gone through have changed me along the way, but there's a core of me in there that's remained. The miles I've run, the places I've traveled, the religion I grew up in (and left)? They're all still with me, but one individual thing did not make me. I sought them out because of who I was to start with. There's will always be you in there, and you were a person of value already (OK, maybe you were an asshole, but then yoga's just going to make you a flexible asshole).
Life is changing you all the time just by living it.
Go out and live the life you want, minus Finding Yourself Inc. Along the way, you'll probably stop worrying about if you're "found." Maybe you'll drop back down to your size-6 jeans (or not, because really, you're not your pants size either). Maybe you'll learn that new language and do something that scares you. And along the way, you'll figure out you. And that's not bullshit.
And for fuck's sake, don't read The Secret.
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