Tylan, Age 18
While we have lived, we all, at some point, have wanted to go somewhere and to get there, we would need to go on a journey. This doesn’t always mean a physical journey, this could be any journey. Some of the biggest journeys are ones other people can’t see and don’t know about. Sometimes they are ones we do all on our own. These are the ones where we are just trying to better ourselves or sometimes we are trying to just find ourselves. These journeys can be big and sometimes they are really small but each and everyone of us finds ourselves on one of them at one point or another.
When we start, we all have one place, or maybe a few, that we want to get to. We spend our time looking towards that place and figuring out how to get there because that is why we started on this journey in the first place. However; sometimes we get lost on our journey and sometimes we focus so much on where we want to go that we forget who we are in the process. I’m here to give you a few tips on how to find yourself while on your journey and not after it.
To start, you need to know who you are. As soon as you step outside your house, comfort zone, or your circle of protection, you will immediately be bombarded with things that will try and make you think, act, feel, or talk like a different person and it is easy to get lost or possibly lose yourself on your journey. When I say lose yourself, I don’t mean the change that takes place along the journey. I am talking about losing your reason for starting on this journey, the reason why you left in the first place.
The next step on our path to finding ourselves is realizing how we best approach problems and changes in our life. We have been on this journey and we are looking for ways to get to our destination but, along the course, we will have to embrace changes in the way we think and the way we do things. For some of us, we think the changes will come naturally and we can fit them into our way of thinking and our way of doing things; however, this isn’t always true. At one point or another, we will face a problem that will require us to change in ways that we just don’t seem to understand. We will feel like we can’t fit the role that we need to in order to overcome the problem in our path. This can be a reason that we can lose ourselves in our journey because we don’t understand how to face opposition. We need to realize what works for us. We need to look back on things we have done on our journey and look for things that we did that made it easy for us. This will help us be able to learn how we can overcome problems in our lives and be able to become who we want to be.
Our next step is to accept help. Asking for help when you need it can be a really important thing to learn. You will be able to get through problems and challenges that come your way a lot easier than without the help. Sometimes you may not realize you need help. Asking for help when you don’t think you need it can be a huge way to find yourself as you will come to understand when and where you need help. There are plenty of times where you don’t need the help but being comfortable enough to ask, even when you might not need it, will be so helpful when you come across problems in the future that you realize are so much bigger than what you first thought they would be. No one ever has complained about someone giving them help on a challenge but there are plenty of people who have complained about not having any help at all.
A great thing to realize when you are trying to find yourself is to make sure that you are looking not only at the path in front of you but also the path behind you. In my own personal journeys there are plenty of times where a quick glance backwards has helped so much because it lets me see if I have missed anything during my journey. Sometimes you look backwards and you haven’t missed anything but other times you will find that some of the most important things on this trip you went right past because you were too focused on the destination in front of you.
My last piece of advice and to conclude is to make sure to look inwards, not just forward. You started this journey on a path and along the way you have grown and changed and become a different person but as you look inwards you might find that your destination isn’t where you want to be at the end of this journey. This is where you take your journey to the next level because it is no longer a journey but multiple journeys, each with their own little starts and finishes, that are part of a quest that you are on to become someone great.