The Journey to Self through the Self
How many of us actually know who we are at age 18…21…28?
Looking back, I know I sure didn’t.
But that’s hindsight for you.
At the time, I thought I knew exactly who I was, exactly what I wanted, and you couldn’t have told me otherwise.
But honestly, instead of spending so much time learning about the Pythagorean theorem and analyzing poetry in high school, I wish we learned a few more practical life skills.
Balancing a checkbook.
Doing our taxes.
Setting boundaries.
How to communicate.
And maybe most importantly—how to question things.
Everything, really.
Because at some point in life, we all experience things that change us.
Some people acknowledge the change and move forward without looking too deeply at what it means.
And then there are people like me.
The people who start questioning all of it.
Where did that belief come from?
Why do I value this over that?
What are my actual thoughts on marriage, family, religion, politics, success, freedom, the system—and what role do I even want to play in any of it?
Call it an existential crisis if you want, but somewhere in my early thirties—though honestly, the unraveling started much earlier than that—I began questioning everything.
Not in a panicked way.
In an inquisitive way.
Without fully realizing it at the time, I think I was trying to meet myself.
Who was this person I had spent my entire life with?
What did she actually believe?
What beliefs no longer aligned with the person she had become?
What did she want out of this life?
And maybe most importantly:
What did a life that felt authentic to me actually look like?
I spent years in therapy.
Partly because I needed to, but also because I genuinely wanted to understand myself better.
I worked with cognitive therapists, hypnotherapists, somatic healers, reiki practitioners, Mexican medicine women… honestly, a little bit of everything.
Some of it resonated deeply.
Some of it didn’t.
But all of it pushed me closer toward myself.
I started taking stock of the people in my life too.
I let go of relationships that no longer felt aligned.
I stopped shrinking myself to maintain comfort for others.
I started taking accountability for parts of my life where I had previously only seen myself as the victim.
And slowly, I began understanding something that changed me completely:
Life was happening for me, not to me.
Sometimes I’m jealous of people who move through life seemingly untouched by these kinds of questions.
Because once you wake up to yourself—really wake up—you can’t unknow what you know anymore.
Cognitive dissonance stops working.
You can no longer move through life asleep at the wheel.
And once that happened for me, I felt like I owed it to myself to fully lean in and start living more honestly.
For me, that looked like questioning the systems I had unconsciously bought into.
It looked like protecting my energy more carefully.
It looked like deleting social media because comparison truly is the thief of joy—and honestly, a massive time suck.
It looked like finally asking myself:
What do I actually want from this life?
Not what looks good.
Not what society says I should want.
Not what keeps other people comfortable.
What do I want?
And the truth is, the answer keeps evolving.
This blog is really just a collection of those thoughts.
A stream of consciousness.
A place where I unpack the past, question old beliefs, process what’s happening in real time, and try to make sense of the human experience as I move through it.
Sometimes I’m reflecting on lessons from years ago.
Sometimes I’m writing about what’s unfolding right now.
But all of it is honest.
All of it is me.
And maybe, if nothing else, this space encourages someone else to start asking themselves the harder questions too.
Especially this one:
What do I really want?