meeting myself

Each day I realize I am not quite who I thought myself to be yesterday. There is no shortage of new knowledge when it comes to understanding who I am, especially considering the fact that I am ever-changing, capricious in mind and matter, never even wholly the same as I was yesterday. Years ago, I discovered the vital importance of spending time alone with myself, looking in the mirror and acknowledging, accepting, and affirming who I am. I don’t think I knew true beauty until I saw myself truly for the first time, sitting criss-cross applesauce before the mirror in my bedroom closet. It’s quite a feeling to come to terms with the fact that you are you, and that you will never be anyone other than that. This fact accompanies a newfound love and a newfound curiosity for who you are. So naturally, I became more inquisitive about every aspect of myself, longing to pinpoint each fact and to discover concrete details of who I was.

It’s strange to be a person struggling to understand yourself wholly and realizing that although you can always inch closer to doing so, you will never truly get there. It’s an eternal journey in which you can always make progress, yet you will never reach your destination.

As I said though, you can always inch closer. There are so many things for you to learn about yourself and so many ways for you to find these things. I personally learned the true benefit of spending time alone with my thoughts - letting a stream of consciousness flow from my brain through my arm to my pen & onto a page. Seeing my thoughts materialized as ink on paper made it miles easier for me to fully comprehend how I actually felt and why I actually felt that way. In turn I learned how I worked internally.

I perused my soul through writing and find special parts of me that I loved dearly and that I still hold on to tightly. Along with these sweet pieces, I also uncovered severely sour sections which I wished I could simply suppress into nothingness. I hoped I could ignore these things, I wanted to wait for them to magically vanish on their own so I wouldn’t have to come face-to-face with them and taste the bitterness myself. The bitterness of myself and my inherent nastiness - whether it be the way I jump to harsh conclusions in a heartbeat, or how I can so easily lose my patience over something trivial, or how I build up animosity towards people to whom I could show more love and grace, or an infinite amount of extra awful habits.

I think it seems easier to forget that I’ve met these parts of myself until I meet them too often and can no longer feign ignorance, when in reality the simplest method in this situation is to spit these sour parts out and throw them away, rather than pour stevia on top of them and try to hide their true flavors in mounds of artificial sweetener. I’m still learning how to get these tastes out of my mouth.

I also find things about me that I don’t understand fully. I think sometimes I am not sure what I think about certain things. I sometimes don’t know how I feel even though I can feel how I feel quite perfectly - my thoughts can’t form themselves into words to describe or explain it. Sometimes I think a thousand different conflicting thoughts that I can’t possibly sort out or organize or understand. Sometimes I think I don’t know who I am at all and I think I may never know, and then I remember again that I am going to be a different person momentarily and understand that even if I could know my present self perfectly, this apparent progress would be wiped from record and I would have to begin again tomorrow, anyways, so it is okay to not know and to not understand.

It is important to be reminded that
sometimes I don’t know who I am.
I am still meeting myself & that is okay.

xoxo
mo