Dear Andrew,

How do I find my identity in a world that expects so much from me? The quest for perfection seems never ending.

With so much love, Grace

Dear Grace,

When we look for ourselves, the aim is not to find a single identity, even if the world is asking for one. Finding ourselves is about embracing the mystery that is us; the mystery between who we are and who we are about to become. The human identity is like a vast and endless ocean that is constantly moving and changing. Everyday we are on the verge of transforming into someone we have never been before.

If we are lucky, we will discover something new about ourselves each day. Maybe we will discover something we never knew was here. Or maybe we will discover something that has just arrived; something that was not here before. Part of what makes life exciting is the pursuit of the unknown; an unknown that will take us to unimaginable places one day.

Often, we believe our ‘true selves’ have all the answers. However, our ‘true selves’ are not all-knowing. An honest existence is about humbling ourselves like eager students; students who are endlessly learning. Like the universe, we are vast and limitless on the inside. We can feel it in our hearts that for everything we discover there is something else we have yet to discover.

We are more than a single moment. We are a marriage between the past, present and future. The past makes our lives colorful and vivid while the present is what gives us life. The future is like a glimmer of hope that inspires us to become larger and more generous than we ever were. To better understand ourselves, we must pay attention to all that is us. We must pay attention to who we have been, who we now are and who we are about to become.

Finding our identity is like meeting a ghost; they are here but also gone. They leave us as soon as they arrive because we are forever changing. We are forever blossoming into people we have no names for yet. To have a genuine relationship with the person we call “I,” we must accept the transitory nature of our identity. We must understand that whoever we discover is about to disappear and re-emerge.

Self-understanding is much like self-love. To understand ourselves, we must first open our hearts. We must open our hearts to the people we see in the mirror every morning. We must greet them with an open and curious mind. We must welcome them like we would a familiar friend; a friend that is always with us even when they are not.

Meeting our true selves happens when we relinquish our preconceived notions. It happens when we surrender the expectation that we need to sound or look a certain way. This means we need to forget ourselves. We need to forget the identities in our heads. The labels we made are too small for who we really are. We are greater than any identity we can articulate or think of and we are on the cusp of becoming so much more. We are on the cusp of becoming someone beautiful and new; someone we did not know we were looking for.

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