Stop finding yourself and start creating yourself
For years, I searched for my passions and purpose, trying to find that perfect IKIGAI, only to realize it’s not about finding who you’re meant to be—it’s about choosing who you want to be.
Welcome to MindfulMess!
In today’s issue, we’ll talk about how I came to the realization that life really is about creating yourself and not just about finding yourself. For some, this might be THE most obvious thing in the world; for others, like me, it was a long learning process—one filled with anxiety and a daunting feeling about the future. However, once I realized this, my life did a 360.
Lost in the search for myself
From a young age, I’ve been very introverted. Part of it was just a tiny special dash of shyness; the other part was a restless sense of not knowing who I was. What made me look like a quiet and shy girl, in reality, was just me carefully observing others.
How was everyone so uniquely themselves? How had they found their passions? How could they envision themselves not only in 10 years but in 20 and 30? How could they do that? Especially when I was over here unsure of which ice cream I liked.
Naturally, as an introverted girl, I was always prone to be reading somewhere in a nice corner. And for a time in my life, after devouring all the teenage vampire and wizardly world novels (hey, I grew up in the 2000s, what did you want me to read?), I started to read every single self-help book I could find. However, they were sending mixed signals.
Some self-help books are all about finding who you are, your true self, the one buried deep inside all of the layers placed by society, your family, your friends, your traumas, your conditions, and on and on it goes. They’re about looking at the past to create a better future.
On the other hand, you find those who talk about breaking through and creating who you want to be. You had a rough family growing up? Doesn’t matter. Did you have a horrible experience in your childhood? Doesn’t matter. Break through that and become who you want to be today, not caring a flying pig about what’s in your rear mirror.
Although you could make an argument for both of these approaches and even say they are just two sides of the same coin (we’ll talk about that later), growing up, I struggled to give myself enough agency to “create myself” and so I went through the path of “finding myself”.
I went through psychotherapy. I sat on the couch, rambling about my past. What had happened, how I had felt, on and on and on. And besides reliving a lot of wounds and traumas I had, it led me nowhere.
Yes, I could pinpoint every single moment in my life that had made me miserable, I could describe each situation with the most vivid clarity and detail. But for me, it didn’t work.
I was still hanging on to my past memories, thinking that that would help me find who I was. That somehow that would bring about a new, fresh Cristina into the picture. But it didn’t.
I even went to a psychiatrist at some point who quickly diagnosed me with dysthymia, a permanent low-grade depression. She even prescribed me medication, which only left me feeling worse because I could feel no deep sadness, but also no real joy. I became a shell of who I was (safe to say I stopped taking it after a month). This was around the time I was 17-19. Imagine being in those challenging and important years and being defined and categorized in that way.
How could I think of a brighter, better future when I had a sign over my head saying I was this?
Luckily, this whole thing shattered when I started Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and if you haven’t read my stuff on Medium, this might be the first time you’ve heard me talk about it, but on Medium, I’ve talked about it at length because it truly changed my life.
Finally taking agency over my life
CBT therapy was groundbreaking for me. Finally, I was sitting face to face with a therapist, and I didn’t have to retell the old tales of my life. I didn’t have to go again, reliving any sad memories; I didn’t have to look at my past. All I had to do was acknowledge that my past responses, habits, and trains of thought were NOT productive or useful for me and instead set a new standard. New habits, new responses, new thoughts, new beliefs.
Do you have any idea of how liberating that was?
From feeling like a victim of my life to feeling like the pilot. It not only gave me agency and a game plan, but it also made me responsible for my life, my feelings, my thoughts, and my future.
Of course, it is a process with a lot of trial and error. But I was able to stop seeing myself as a victim of my past, and more like a creator of my future.
I blame social media a little, too, for this belief that we are what our past has set us out to be. We see all of this talk about traumas, generational traumas, limiting beliefs, and lots and lots of tags, labels, and defining words whose purpose (I believe) is to box us down. To give us only a tunnel vision of what our future could be.
But, I know, that’s just a very narrow point to make here. After all, not everyone wants to victimize themselves. However, having done that myself with my life, I understand the appeal. It’s easy to blame our families, blame the wealth (or lack thereof) that we were raised in, blame the school system, blame the people that hurt us, and heck, I even just blamed social media for perpetuating this idea lol. But, I hope you see that in the end when we focus not on who we were but on who we want to be we can start to walk in the right direction.
A bridge between the yogi philosophy and the idea of creating ourselves
If you’ve read the previous newsletters where I talked about the yogi philosophy, you might be wondering, “Didn’t you say there that yoga, something you connect with and agree with, says that we should indeed look under the layers of all of the life stuff that has happened to us to find out who we truly are? Wouldn’t that be disagreeing with this very post?”
Well, as I said before, I think the idea of finding ourselves and creating ourselves can be intertwined with the following argument:
Yoga teaches us that there is a powerful essence beneath all those layers. This energy, this life force, this real us is who is behind those layers, and when we finally realize that the ideas we have of those layers are what’s stopping us from coming out of our shell, we can direct all of that powerful energy into materializing who we want to be.
So yeah, there is an “us” behind all those layers, but the way to get to it is by understanding the layers and giving them the actual weight that they have in our lives, which is not that heavy. Those are paper-thin layers that we’ve made ourselves believe are concrete, 1-meter thick layers.
There’s a reason we all love a good biography, one where we see someone having grown up with the roughest of childhoods, no money, no perspective of a future, and then see them make of themselves everything they ever imagined and more—and best of all, they become more themselves.
We, as a society, look up to that. The resilience, the hard work, the go-getter attitude, yet we don’t teach it or support it enough. It’s only when we see the success of the person that we applaud and assume it must have been easy, but during the effort and grueling stages, we just look over and say, “Stop, don’t bother with that, look at your past, you really think this life is for you? Stay in this box, is better for you. It’s what you know.”
To be ready you have to act first
Now, you might be telling yourself: “Yeah, sure, creating yourself. But what about when your old habits are so rooted in you that they are hard to stop? How can you create a new you with the weight of the old you still hanging on your back?”
The answer: you just act. You don’t wait to be ready. You don’t wait for the past you to dissolve away. You don’t wait for the perfect opportunity. You just make a conscious decision and promise yourself that from this moment onwards you will start behaving, thinking, and acting like the you you want to create.
We have this idea that we need to first be ready, and then we act. But that’s completely wrong. You first act, and then realize you were ready.
A quick example of this was when I had a full-on nervous breakdown when presenting a project in front of the whole class during my Masters. When I stood in front of my peers, I could mutter about five words before I had to run away to hyperventilate and puke my guts out in the bathroom.
Up to that point, I had created a version of myself that was so frightened of speaking in public that I simply couldn’t. During my high school years, I had plenty of bad experiences, and slowly and with time, I had cemented it in my brain that I just couldn’t do it. That it was beyond me. And to be honest, it felt that way. Running to the bathroom was a primal response. I couldn’t think or breathe while I was in that room in front of my friends, professor, and other students. My mind went blank. There was not an ounce of conscious thinking; it was just a reaction.
Luckily, at the time that catastrophic incident happened, I was already going to CBT therapy. And I got to talk about it with my therapist.
Here are the three things he made me aware of:
It happened. Now I can move on. Just because something that I hated happened, doesn’t mean it can define me in any way, shape, or form. It was a tiny bleep in my life. That’s it.
If I started seeing the “nerves” before a presentation as “excitement,” I could change the way I perceive the situation, and so I could change my response to it. After all, when we’re nervous, we get sweaty hands, our heart beats faster, and we can’t think straight, all things we also do when we’re excited (or falling in love). The only thing that changes is our view of the symptoms, and as such, our emotional response to it changes.
I could change right now to stop that from happening again. I just had to do it.
So, after that talk, and thinking that I might still need to “make myself ready” (buying into this popular idea) for the next time, I went to two theater classes they gave at the local theater and I also went to this “comedy for scientists” event they were doing at uni where at the end of three weeks we could do a 5-minute stand-up routine related to science and our lives as students.
However, I only went to two theater classes and only one of the comedy sessions. Although that’s what people told me to do, I just didn’t see the relationship; one (the one I was afraid of) is in an academic setting, and the others are just for fun and giggles.
So, getting “ready” had led me nowhere. Because the only way I could be ready is if I just present in front of an audience in an academic setting, that’s it. I had to do it to be ready.
Long story short, I did a 1-month summer school in Barcelona, and at the end of the program, we had to present our business idea in front of the whole summer program (students, professors, and invited staff), as well as in front of five judges that were there to decide which group won an award.
The stakes were high. Not only would it affect my grades in the summer program, it was also a competition against students from all over Europe.
Well, with the CBT starting to make an impact in my subconscious, I said, “f#ck it, I CAN do this.” We were put together in groups of five, but only three people could present from each group. I convinced my peers I had to do it. I was the only woman in my group and I needed the practice for when I would present my dissertation for my Masters.
I NEVER said to anyone I was afraid of public speaking, I didn’t even say it to myself. Whenever the memories of what had happened at uni, or the other many horrible memories I had of presenting appeared, I would tell myself, that was in the past, and it does not define me.
And if anyone asked me if I was nervous about the presentation, I would respond “Nervous? No, excited! This is going to go great.” And honestly, after a while, I started to believe it.
Presentation day arrived, and I stood on the stage (more nerve-wracking than just standing in a classroom). I inhaled deeply, and off I went…
It shouldn’t come as a surprise now that we won the first prize and I got great feedback about my presentation skills.
Was I panicking slightly in my head whilst presenting? Yes.
Was I sweating like a racehorse? You bet.
Do I now love public speaking and I’m a pro like a TED Talk speaker? Not really, but I don’t avoid it like the plague.
After that, I presented my dissertation successfully, and I taught yoga in front of as many as 30 students.
The whole point of this story is that there was no way for me to be ready, except by doing it. And to do it, I had to change my inner thoughts leading up to it.
That’s the problem I see with labels and focusing on our past selves. We start to believe that the evidence we have from past experiences is a definition of who we are. When this couldn’t be further from the truth. Our past does not define us. What defines us is our subconscious ideas about ourselves, but luckily we can redirect those ones as long as we focus on building new ideas, new perceptions, and new realities.
The process of self-creation is never-ending. We figure out who we are through constant experimentation and not letting any single habit or behavior define us. Just like it is bad to live under other people’s ideas of ourselves, we shouldn’t do us a disservice by boxing ourselves and living under the wrong ideas we have of ourselves.
So, take your time if you need to, but figure out who you want to be, and start creating a reality where that new you show up every day. Don’t “fake it till you make it” but become it, right now.
”The deepest secret is that life is not a process of discovery, but a process of creation. You are not discovering yourself, but creating yourself anew. Seek therefore, not to find out Who You Are, but seek to determine Who You Want to Be.”
— Neale Donald Walsch
“Self-belief is overrated, generate evidence.” — Ryan Holiday
That’s it for today!
As always, thank you for reading! Hope you enjoy reading my ramblings.
If you find any value in this or want me to talk about a specific topic, don’t be shy, my inbox is always open!
See you soon in the next issue of MindfulMess.
With MindfulMessy love,
Cris. 💌