Know who you are: How to REALLY know yourself
Do you know who you are? Or are you holding on to how other people see you?
Do you really know yourself? People define themselves by accomplishments and efforts. It is time to get to know the ‘you’ behind the mask. It is time to actually get to know the person you are on the inside.
Who are you? Do you know yourself?
Tell me something about you.
Really, it can be anything, something connected to your personality that instantly allows me some insights into your world.
Feeling stressed by the question already?
I can imagine.
Do we actually really know ourselves?
Whenever I have to tell someone about myself my brain calls out for instant panic, red lights, sirens. And suddenly I can’t even remember my own name. When I’m in a new class or meeting and someone says that we should all introduce ourselves to one another – god forbid if it’s through some kind of ‘fun’ game – I feverishly start digging through my memory for the most interesting thing I have ever done in my life.
I try to think of all the celebrities I have met, all the trophies I have won, all the accomplishments that I could talk about for… well five minutes tops.
On a good day.
And when it is finally my turn to say something exciting about my life, I tell them that I am 29 years old, live with over fifty green roommates (ha-ha) and that I am very creative because I like to read, write, draw and sing along to my favorite Spotify playlists. That sounds a lot more like a bad Tinder profile than I would actually want it to.
And I’m betting no one would even remember me after that talk. Because after the tiny bit of information that I shared, what do you actually know about me?
I am a talking resumé with not a whole lot of previous experience on it.
Short summary for quick readers
- Most people, when they have to introduce themselves, will only talk about their job and other external, less personal things. But is that really who we are? Is that what distinguishes us from others?
- You are more than your productivity and accomplishments. Those are part of you, but they're not all there is to your unique personality.
- You can build your own personality 'profile' through three pointers: the past, the present and the future. The past means: looking at where you came from. This doesn't have to be deep or traumatic, but it has to mean something.
- The present means who you are right now and the special things in your life that you appreciate and find important. This can be anything as long as it's important to you
- The future is what you look forward to in life. Where you want to go. Hopes and dreams and goals.
- With these three pointers, you can journal about who you are and create a more interesting reply to the question "can you introduce yourself" than 'I am ... and I work ..."
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How do you know ‘you’?
I want us to try a little exercise. Write down your name and below that, three things that you would use to describe yourself with. That you have used to describe yourself with. We’re all new here; tell us a little something about yourself!
Go ahead, I’ll give you some time.
There is so much information lost in the narrative that we choose to introduce ourselves with. But if I would have told you that I play the saxophone does that mean you know me a little better? If you knew that I love to read non-fiction, does that mean we are closer now?
It feels like we always speak about ourselves in terms of what we do, what we like, the things we have seen and our accomplishments… but not who we are.
Do we even know who we are then?
To ‘know’ yourself might be the difficult part
When I asked you to list three things that say something about who you are, you probably wrote down your job or the degree you got, your age and you might even throw in some hobbies.
But is a teacher really who you are? Is ‘Netflix-binger’ part of your personality? If you were perfectly honest with yourself, could this list still be traced back to you if you had not written your name at the top of the page? Or could your profession, age, and your love for taking walks in the park – traits that you use to describe yourself – also be used to describe a whole bunch of other people?
I can feel the identity crisis coming up. I can see your eyes widen and your brain getting ready to abandon everything you have ever known to be true. The little controller in there is throwing around files looking for ‘the REAL you’. You’re getting ready to scream at the mirror, rip your clothes off and run around in a frenzy screaming ‘WHO AM I?!’ until the neighbors come to help get you down from the closet in your bedroom.
Take a deep breath. It is going to be OK.
Look within to get to know all of you
The truth is that you do indeed know who you are. Deep down, all the information is there. You just need to tap into it and change your perspective.
Instead of focusing on the external things, the ‘productivity’ of it all, let’s focus on the person behind it all. You need a new life story to tell about yourself. One that matches the unique and beautiful person that you are.
A story that breathes life and oozes identity.
A story that is uniquely yours.
One that tells me that you know who you are.
All you need to do is look inside of yourself and open your eyes to whatever is happening in there. Because that is the information that makes you ‘you’. Of course the external stuff is part of it. But of all the ‘teacher with two kids that likes going out for a drink with friends’, only one of them carries the exact same qualities that you do.
At this point you might be giving me the eye-roll.
I see you.
I know you are skeptical and you need to see in order to believe. Well, don’t worry. We are going to see and then you are going to believe.
Your accomplishments are not useless
I know you’re thinking: ‘So I just shouldn’t mention anything about what I do and my accomplishments?’. I’m not trying to make the external stuff into ‘he who must not be named’. It will always be a part of who you are because it helps explain the internal stuff. Your actions and achievements are driven by what happens on the inside.
We just have to make sure that we do not define ourselves through the boring order of things. That’s what I call the ‘name-age-job-hobby’s’-speech that we usually revert to while describing our identity. We are not what we do, but it is part of who we are. Let’s try another exercise to get some external stuff out in the open. So we can use it to lay out the delicate map of our identity. Write down your name, your job, hobby’s, things you like, things you don’t like, your favorite color. Whatever you want to.
There are SO many external options available. Even if I would not use the name-age-job-hobby list, I could still come up with plenty of things that externally describe me. Look:
‘I have three siblings, I grew up in The Netherlands, I have a partner and we’ve been together for almost three years now.’
And so on…
For now we are completely focusing on the external stuff because it is going to give us something more interesting than: ‘My name is Wendy, I am 29 years old and I work in customer service…’ I almost fell asleep halfway through that sentence.
Next we’re going to figure out how to use our likes, dislikes, hobby’s and accomplishments as an all-revealing name tag.
If you need some more time to figure these out, check out my blog about being yourself. Maybe that will spark some inspiration.
Know the inside: it is part of who you are
Right now, we have to figure out what is on the inside. To know what is going on within your mind. Of course we’ll do so by writing. My favorite activity. We won’t just mindlessly write stuff down, there is an order to things that helps us structure a good ‘life story’.
It all starts the same way every great story starts: with the past. Then we move on to the present and in the end we’ll look to the future. During all this we pay close attention to the inside, not just what you have accomplished or what you have done, but who you are.
#1. The past
To know who you are, you have to look at where you came from. The past tells us about the things that happened to make you into the person you have become today. This does not have to be the heavy stuff. Your childhood trauma does not have to define your identity if you don’t want it to.
Think about the things in your past that feel important to you. Things that made present ‘you’ into the person you are today. You might want to take some inspiration from the list of external things that you made earlier.
Introducing: my past
‘I used to believe I was supposed to follow a clear path that my parents and society set out for me. When I moved to the United States by myself in 2017 to live there for two years, I learned so much about who I am and about life. I discovered there are other alternatives to the life I was threatened with for years and I learned that I wanted to become a person that was kind and open to the stories of others. This is a big part of why I started blogging.’
See how something internal relates to something external? See how they work together to create a story? That small arrangement of letters on a blank page not only tells you more about me as a person, it also makes you feel some way about me. You might like me, or not. Maybe you think I’m pretentious or you envy me. It doesn’t matter.
At least you feel something. More than the boring order of things has ever made you feel. You know me a little better now.
So go ahead and try. Pick an important event from your past that shaped you in some way and write about how and why it shaped you. The event itself isn’t the most important part of what you write down; the event, or the external, is there to support the internal narrative. You can first write down the important events and their ‘side effects’, just so you won’t get overwhelmed. After that you can make it all into an interesting paragraph.
#2. The present
Moving on to the ‘here and now’: the present day. The present is a tough one. Just because most of the internal stuff we experience in the present is stuff we’re not fully aware of yet. Inner turmoil that you can not explain or fully understand, but it’s guiding your actions in more ways than you know; influencing all that you do.
This is why the present will consist of more external things. But also in this case, we pick things that have special meaning. So if your job is just something you do on the side to make money but you don’t have any special feelings towards it, then why mention it? Do you want that to be part of your identity? I know I am not a customer service employee. It’s what I do, it is not what I am so I am not going to portray myself as such.
You know you are more than that
Instead, mention the dog that lives with you whom you rescued a few months ago or talk about all the fun things you do with your kids. Tell me about your partner and how they make you challenge yourself every day or about the love that you give your parents.
The only requirement is that what you pick holds meaning for you. Look at the list of things you created earlier and pick some things in your present life that make you happy or ones that don’t make you happy at all but that are teaching you some important lesson. It might be good to first try and think of three things. If you want to write more, be my guest! Your introduction does not have to be under two minutes. Make it into a monologue if that’s what you like. Just make sure you mention why you wrote them down. What do they mean to you and how do they help in getting to know the real you?
Who I am right now
‘I have been enjoying writing for my blog and it is making me realize that I would really like to blog full time. Writing about things that can help other people makes me feel good, like I have purpose.
I’m a procrastinator, which is limiting me in my writing and keeps me away from my computer, and with that from my purpose. My plants, whom I love and who make me happy whenever I look at them, are also teaching me to let go of control, which scares me. But it’s a good lesson to learn for someone who loves to control everything. When I spend time studying to be a psychologist, I am reminded of how much the human mind fascinates me and I know we can all be better than we are being right now. That motivates me to keep going and to try and make an impact on the world.’
That’s a big step forward from ‘Hi, my name is Wendy and I like plants’. A huge step.
Don’t feel intimidated by the way your life story sounds or looks; it does not have to be pretty or poetic. Your tone of writing is just as much part of your identity as the words on the page, so let that identity shine through splotches of black and white, painting a picture of you.
#3. The future
Now all that is left is to look forward and step into the future.
The future can be anything. Your hopes and dreams are a big part of who you are and so they can be external things too. If you want to travel the world or learn how to play the guitar, then that is an internal desire you experience. The key, again, is to attach it to an explanation.
‘My hopes and dreams for the future are to be able to do what I love while also blogging on the side and making a decent income. This gives me the freedom to travel, work on my art and help people the way I want to help them. Psychology will be a big part of this. I really want to make an impact on the world and make sure things like mental illness and distress will be reduced by changing the systems we live in. Eventually I want to write a book about kindness, hoping to inspire people to be kinder and better to one another. If the future is more kind, I will be less anxious to live in it.’
There you have it. My future identity.
Just as much part of who I am as the past and the present. It is just as much part of getting to know me.
And your future identity can change.
All of them can. The present changes into the past which then influences the way the future will look. Identity is not set in stone and you get to choose what it looks like. All it needs to be is authentic to you.
This is me
Hi. My name is Wendy and I am 29 years old. When I was younger I used to believe I was supposed to follow a clear path that my parents and society set out for me. When I moved to the United States by myself in 2017 to live there for two years, I learned so much about who I am and about life. I discovered that there are other alternatives to the life I was threatened with for years and I learned that I wanted to become a person that was more kind and open to the stories of others. This is a big part of why I started blogging.
I know who I am
I have been enjoying writing for my blog these days and it is making me realize that I would really like to make blogging a bigger part of my life. Writing about things that can help other people makes me feel good, like I have purpose.
I’m a procrastinator, which is limiting me in my writing and keeps me away from my computer and with that from my purpose. My plants, whom I love and who make me happy whenever I look at them, are also teaching me to let go of control, which scares me. But it’s a good lesson to learn for someone who loves to control everything. When I spend time studying to be a psychologist, I am reminded of how much the human mind fascinates me and I know we can all be better than we are being right now. That motivates me to keep going and to try and make an impact on the world.
And where I want to go
My hopes and dreams for the future are to be able to do what I love while also blogging on the side and making a decent income. This gives me the freedom to travel, work on my art and help people the way I want to help them. Psychology will be a big part of this. I really want to make an impact on the world and make sure the occurrence of things like mental illness and distress will be reduced by changing the systems we live in. Eventually I want to write a book about kindness, hoping to inspire people to be kinder and better to one another. If the future is more kind, I will be less anxious to live in it.
That is my life story. Uniquely mine.
Do you feel it? Do you feel life and identity breathing through the blank spaces between the letters? That’s what we are going for. That is what makes you know yourself.
Your turn to help me know you
Writing this gets me all excited to read yours. I can’t wait to feel things while finding out and getting to know who you are. Please feel free to leave your introduction in the comments. I’m dying to read it and to get excited about all of you.
If you need more inspiration to write, you can check out these journal prompts. They might provide you with some additional insights that can enrich your life story even more.
Remember: you write your own life story and you get to decide what is included in it and what is not. And after writing it, you don’t owe anyone anything. If you want to change the story again tomorrow, then go for it. We are humans and we are constantly changing; evolving. Getting to know yourself means accepting that this knowledge can change.
Having a deeper understanding of who you are can help you evolve and can help you grow into the person you would like to be one day. Knowing your identity, the things that define you that are not just the checks on your to-do-list, will eventually help you stay true to your authentic self.
No matter who you decide that is.
