How to Find Yourself

If you’re trying to find yourself, there’s an assumption buried in the phrase. That there’s a self already there, fully formed, that got mislaid somewhere, and the job is retrieval. You find things that exist and are lost.

What’s usually underneath it is more ordinary. A lack of fit with your life. A sense that something is missing. Not unhappiness exactly, but not fulfilment either.

And the standard answer is to look harder. Travel, journal, take the personality test, take a year out. All of it accepts the premise. But will you find it? Are you actually capable of that?

What people do

When people set out to find themselves, there’s a fairly standard list of things they do.

They travel. New cultures, new places, new people. They take a year out, or some time out, and do something completely different to whatever they’d been doing. They go to therapy. They take tests, personality type, attachment style. They do courses, retreats, they get a coach. They read. They explore religion.

I’ve done a number of these. Therapy several times, in a few forms: hypnosis, talk therapy, CBT. I found CBT genuinely practical. That sensation of oh, I’d never thought of it like that, and it makes sense. Very effective on a logical brain. Talk therapy is useful too, in a different way. Going in and emptying your head is cathartic in itself, whatever else happens. And I’ve found the personality tests useful.

But they all had something in common, which took me a while to notice. They were small optimisations for coping better with the life I already had.

They don’t switch on a light in a dark room.

Why looking harder doesn’t work

I’m not dismissing any of it. I’ve done my share and it has helped.

But they work with what you bring. And what you bring is your life.

They help you make your current life better. What they don’t do, and can’t do, is step back far enough to ask a different question: maybe the problem isn’t that this life needs optimising. Maybe I need a different life.

And that’s not really a limitation of therapy. It’s a limitation of the position you’re asking from.

Twenty years in an industry doesn’t just take up your time. It teaches you what to want. It hands you the vocabulary you’d use to describe yourself, the things you’d list if someone asked what mattered to you, the working definition of a life going well. Most of that gets absorbed rather than chosen, and it happens slowly enough that it never feels like it’s happening.

So when you sit down to work out who you really are, the thing doing the working out is made of the same material as the thing you’re trying to see past. The search returns roughly what was put into it.

What’s left

So where does that leave you? If you can’t think your way to it, and the tools work with what you bring, what’s left?

Reactions. The things that happen before you’ve had a chance to tidy them up.

Anything you conclude about yourself has been through the machinery. But reactions arrive first and you don’t get a vote. Which makes them the only self-reporting that isn’t self-reported.

Two of mine.

The first is that almost nothing I’ve worked towards has felt like much once I got there. I remember a classmate at our graduation saying to me that I’d be successful. Not someone I was close to, just someone in the year. I asked why he thought that. He said he just knew. And by any visible measure he was right. Company director before thirty, six figures, and a decade of similar things after that. Every time, within a fortnight: big whoop. Now what.

The second is envy, which is more useful because you can’t fake it. There’s another guy from the same course who became a professional musician. Gigs all over the world, different city every day. And here’s the thing. I wouldn’t want that. A different city every day is not my idea of a good time. But I’ve watched his life from a distance for twenty years and something goes off every time.

Which was confusing until I worked out what I was actually envious of. Not the music, and not the touring. It’s that he said fuck convention and did what he wanted. No get a job, get a mortgage, get ahead. He just asked what he wanted and then did it.

I never asked.

Reading the signals

So what do you actually work with?

Envy, and whatever the opposite of interest is. Both have the same advantage: neither is voluntary. You can talk yourself into wanting something. You can’t talk yourself into envying it.

But envy has to be read properly, and the standard mistake is to check whether you’d want that person’s life, decide you wouldn’t, and throw the signal away. I don’t want to be a touring musician. I’d be miserable inside a month. The envy was still there for twenty years, which means it was never about the touring. The question isn’t do I want their life. It’s what specifically is going off here.

The other signal is harder to name because it isn’t boredom exactly. The work isn’t dull. I can do it, and do it well, and that’s the problem. I do it well and think: so what. Do it well, do it badly, in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t much matter either way.

The reflex at this point is to say you’re not trying to save lives, nobody is, get over yourself. I’ve said it to myself plenty. But that sets the bar somewhere nobody clears, which is convenient, because then the question closes. The test isn’t whether the work is important. It’s whether the outcome is one you’d have chosen to care about.

In practice this is less involved than it sounds. When the envy shows up, don’t ask whether you want that person’s life. Ask what specifically went off. When the so-what arrives, note what you were doing at the time. And write both down somewhere, because they don’t accumulate in memory. Each one feels like a mood at the time and disappears by the following week.

This isn’t only about work

Everything above is drawn from a career, because that’s where mine came from. But the mechanism isn’t specific to jobs.

A long relationship does the same thing. So does raising small children, or caring for a parent, or any arrangement that takes up enough of your life for long enough. It isn’t that these things stop you knowing what you want. It’s that they teach you what to want, in exactly the way an industry does, and they do it slowly enough that it never registers as happening.

Which is why people come out of a twenty-year marriage and find they have no idea what they like. Not because their preferences were suppressed. Because the preferences they have were formed inside something, and now the something is gone and the preferences don’t obviously belong to anyone.

The same applies to the parent whose children have left, or the person who has just retired from a role they held for decades. The usual reading is that these are transitions and the difficulty is adjustment. Some of it is. But part of it is discovering that a self you assumed was yours turns out to have been substantially built by an arrangement, and it doesn’t survive the arrangement intact.

The signals work the same way in all of these. What goes off when you see how someone else lives. What lands flat when you do it well.

But I can’t do anything about it

This is the objection, and it’s fair.

You’re forty-five with a mortgage. Even if all of the above is true, the space to act on it may not exist. What good is better information about a life you can’t change?

I’d take that seriously rather than argue with it, because I’ve been in the version of it where the space did exist and it still wasn’t enough.

When I was made redundant I had a finite runway and real financial pressure, which is about as much forcing pressure as a person gets. I also had a diagnosis. I knew what I didn’t want: another senior role in a large organisation, political, in service of something I couldn’t convince myself mattered. And I had a direction, which was to work for myself, using what I already knew, without an employer and without the parts of the job I’m not built for.

Negative signal and positive direction, both clear, with a deadline attached. And I was stifled by indecision anyway.

I did eventually act on it. That took a few years. It produced one thing that failed and, out of the wreckage of the failure, something that works. None of which arrived fast enough or at sufficient scale to replace a salary, so I’m employed again.

So I’m not going to tell you that knowing produces change. It might not. What it produces is a shorter list. When something does open up, and things do open up, usually without being asked, the difference between people who move and people who don’t is mostly whether they had anything to move towards.

The evidence isn’t for acting today. It’s so that you’re not starting from nothing on the day you can.

Finding is the wrong word

The problem with trying to find yourself is that it assumes you know what you’re looking for. And it’s very hard to find something when you don’t.

People reach for the needle in the haystack. It’s the wrong metaphor here. You don’t know that it’s a needle, and you don’t know that it’s in the haystack.

Which is why finding is the wrong verb. You won’t find it, because there’s nothing lost. What you can do is notice.

Everything in the list at the start is looking. The retreat, the test, the year out, the trip. Active, effortful, and all of it conducted from the same position. Noticing is different. You don’t go anywhere to do it. You pay attention to reactions you were having anyway, you keep some record of them, and over a long enough period they start to point somewhere.

What that gets you isn’t an answer. It’s evidence. And the difference matters. The decisions that come out of this, whether to change something or whether to stay, are otherwise made on a feeling you have no way of checking.

I can’t tell you it resolves. I’m in my forties, I’ve been paying attention for a while, and I haven’t arrived anywhere final. What I have is better information than I had. Which is less than I wanted, and more than the courses gave me.