Have you taken the time to meet yourself?

It’s possible for a person to be going through life without ever having met themself. The whole idea behind meeting yourself sounds outrageous. After all, you’ve known yourself since the day you were born, right? Wrong. Throughout our lives, we meet different people and we create relationships with them.

In these relationships we yearn to learn more about them. From the small things such as the soccer team that they support to the bigger things such as the trauma that has shaped them into who they currently are. When we’re truly invested in relationships, we try our best to find out everything we can about the other party in order to understand them, love them well and share positive experiences with them.

But do you have that same curiosity when it comes to your own life? Do you truly understand the trauma that has shaped you into who you are today? Are you truly invested in your relationship with yourself? Because if you were, you would be trying to find out everything about yourself in order to understand who you are, why you act in the way that you do and in turn love yourself well and fill your life with positive experiences.

Why you should meet yourself

The quality of your life truly does change the moment you decide to invest in yourself and invest in learning about yourself. There are habits that you need to break and toxic traits and behaviours that you have and these things are hindering you from succeeding in different aspects of your life. They may stop you from succeeding in your relationships with other people, your career, but most importantly your relationship with yourself. The goal in life is always to be happy, and self-awareness is in direct correlation with happiness.

Unfortunately, you might not realize that you have these bad habits and toxic traits if you do not take the time to analyze your life and your behaviours. This is why it’s important to finally take the time to meet yourself and learn as well as discover all the different aspects that make you who you are. The most important person that you will meet in your life is yourself. Because through this interaction, you will begin to understand the things that add on to your life and do more of that, together with the things that subtract from your life, and eliminate them.

Discovering your negative traits

This post will begin by discussing the negative aspects as these are extremely vital, despite the stigma around bringing them to light. Especially in this new age, aided by social media, we are encouraged to show all the best aspects of our lives and give them the spotlight while hiding all the bad things and not bringing them to light. However one chooses to portray themself on the internet is entirely up to them, but there needs to be an acknowledgement that there is a difference between the “perfect” us that we choose to show people and the real us. Because in real life, everyone has problems. And everyone has toxic traits. It takes an enormous amount of strength to look yourself in the mirror and accept that you’re toxic and you need to work on yourself.

But you cannot change what you do not acknowledge. And acknowledgement comes from knowledge. Knowledge about yourself can only be found after meeting yourself, which is why it is highly important to do so.

One way in which you can meet yourself is through a technique that I will always recommend: journaling. Journaling is a way of directly removing thoughts from your mind and putting them on a piece of paper or a screen (for instance, on your notes app in your phone) in order to view your thoughts objectively. When thoughts are stuck in the mind, it’s difficult to break them down and put them in their raw form. When you start putting to paper your thoughts and emotions, it allows you to evaluate where these thoughts and emotions are coming from, and whether or not they are good for you. Journaling puts things into perspective.

For instance, you could write in your journal that your boyfriend was extremely busy today and you spent the whole day frustrated and unhappy because he could not dedicate his time to you. If you had simply felt these emotions, they would have passed and gone. But by taking the time to find out more about yourself and confronting these feelings, you may for example come to the conclusion that you are co-dependent on your boyfriend and you fully rely on him, and not yourself, for your wellbeing. There you go, you’re learning very important things about yourself! Therefore, you’re now aware of this co-dependency problem and you will work towards solving it. You will learn to love yourself and be there for yourself, which will in turn improve your quality of life because you will not be dependent on anything outside of yourself for happiness. This truly reveals the importance of meeting yourself.

Embracing the positive aspects

This does not mean that the positive aspects should be ignored, they also play an important role. Through taking the time to know oneself, a person finds out the things that add on to their life and make them feel happy, encouraged, excited, motivated and all other positive feelings that we enjoy experiencing.

Whatever brings the sunshine to your life, do more of it! If you find that your mood is improved by helping other people, go out there and help as many people as you can. If you find that you feel happier when you travel and experience new places, travel more and experience new places! Things as small as watching your soccer team’s matches and listening to your favourite music whilst taking a walk or a bath may have a positive impact on you. And if they do, do more of that.

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It seems that through all the duties that we have, which may involve going to work in order to afford certain necessities such as buying food, paying the rent, buying gas for the car or even studying for the degree that we’re desperately working hard for, we sometimes forget that our happiness should be a priority through it all. So even while working, we should continue to do the things that make us happy and make us feel fulfilled. Maybe working does that for you, but how can you know if you haven’t taken the time to know yourself?

You are the most important person that you will ever meet, and that interaction will change your life forever. Life becomes an easier journey when you are self-aware and you understand your thoughts patterns and the reasons for your actions.

You will know what to put your energy towards and what to preserve your energy from as it will simply drain you. You will understand the kinds of activities that you should partake in and those you should stay away from because they will hurt you. You will know the kinds of people that you should surround yourself with and those that you should stay away from because they will subtract from your peace. You will develop positive habits that will aid you in different aspects of your life as well as recognize and ditch negative habits that always derail you.

In a nutshell: by meeting yourself, you will understand who you are and in turn love and create positive experiences for yourself.