12. Another way to self-discovery
June 6, 2025
For the past few essays, I have been talking about the idea of self-awareness, or maybe it would be better called self-discovery. It’s been so long since we had that easy connection to ourselves that we need to cut through bramble and build new trails to find ourselves again. But also, we have changed as we have lived our lives – we have learned, grown, failed, succeeded – and all those experiences are a part of our story now. The experiences of our lives have shifted our inner selves in ways we are probably not aware of yet. Maybe we should say we are re-constructing our understanding of who we are. Starting with looking back, taking account of where we started and where we have been, and then forging on forward.
There are a million ways to get there. I am not an expert in those, and to be honest, the only expert that you need to have telling you what to do is you. Yes, you need to decide to take this journey and then seek tools that have been developed by others - explore, ask, read, talk, listen. You don’t need to build your own road from scratch since there are so many out there – but start. Wonder. Revel in the joy and magic that is you. It’s all there. Just maybe hidden behind veils that are meant to protect us. We simply need to brush them aside, once we are ready.
In a memoir I read recently, “The Order of Chaos: A Memoir about Chasing Joy” by Sarah Gormley, she said her therapist told her that three things make all of us who we are, a Venn diagram of three overlapping circles (I do love a good Venn diagram). Pulling directly from the text, the first one is “hereditary – what comes from genetic makeup. One circle is environment – what we experience and live through. And the third circle is what we bring into the world entirely on our own, our individual star.” This seems consistent with our general mental model about what makes us who we are – part what traits have been passed down from our parents (that’s the nature part), part what has been our experience as a child, as a teenager, as an adult (that’s the nurture part) and part something else – something innate that is only ours. That innate part is what I have been talking about in my essays already – the inner self, the true self – and in some traditions it is called the soul.
In the figure that accompanies this essay, I drew that Venn diagram, to see if I liked how it looked; it is the figure on the top. I do like the idea that only some of our hereditary traits, and only some of the traits we have built through our lived experience impact the person we are. We are not destined based on our biology or our journey thus far, though those elements certainly are a part of us. I didn’t like so much that some of the “our individual star” element did not show up in our essence.
I decided to draw my own figure - the one on the bottom. We start in the center of the figure at birth, with genetic heredity and soul. Then, the spiral shows our journey, including the ways that interaction with the world (the environmental part) can impact our journey. Those small spirals are experiences. I like the idea that we have some control over the experiences that we let into our spiral to influence our life. Maybe we don’t think about it that way, but each decision we make about how to spend our time, who to spend our time with, what type of places we do to, and so on, all offer experiences that impact our journey. I am sharing these two figures as potential mental models for another perspective to explore your own inner self - hopefully they are useful to you.
A family member who is about ten years older than me commented on one of my earlier posts with one of these essays, saying “most people who are over 65 don't know who they are and don't know what they want.” Let’s not be those people. Let’s take an active role in figuring out what makes us tick, what holds us back, what helps us to be more ourselves. This is the core of the elders-in-training plan.
