On the Inner Work of Becoming Oneself

In the years I have spent honing my ear toward our inner lives, one human dynamic has become increasingly apparent: how often we look beyond ourselves, hoping the outside world will help us understand who we are. In this sense, much of life is spent looking outward to answer an inward question.

This makes sense, particularly when we are young and need others to feed and clothe us, teach us how to care for ourselves, and help us understand how the world works. In order to grow and thrive, we need the presence of others, or else we do not survive long enough to become anyone in any meaningful sense.

And yet there are certain questions the outside world can help us approach and examine more deeply, but it cannot answer them for us in any definitive way. We can gather wisdom from others, listen to their guidance, and take stock of how they have made their own way in life. But when it comes to the larger questions—who am I, what do I believe in deeply, and what matters most in the way I live my life—no one else can answer them for us. The risk is that when we rely too heavily on someone else’s guidance, we may begin to mistake their answer for our own. How can someone else’s life decide who we are to ourselves?

There are times when I sit with my patients and feel centered, present, and absorbed in the moment. I am able to listen for the themes and connections within what they are sharing. In these moments, my attention can move with the person rather than stand outside what they are telling me.

It has taken decades for me to enter this kind of liminal experience and trust it enough not to rush to do something with it. When it happens, I experience it as one of the rarer forms of attention I know: being deeply with another person while also feeling at home in myself. For me, it resembles an attuned reverie, where what is being conveyed is heard at different psychological and emotional levels. At times, it feels akin to communing with the spirit, or what Martin Buber calls an I-Thou encounter.

June came to see me because decisions at work had begun to feel almost impossible. On the surface, they seemed ordinary enough: whether she should speak up in a department meeting, ask her boss for more time on an upcoming project, or say she could not take on another assignment. But each decision stirred up more anxiety than the situation itself seemed to warrant. Over time, what first appeared to be a problem of confidence at work began to feel closer to a fear of what might happen if she disappointed one of her colleagues or higher-ups.

As we continued exploring June’s fears at work, small comments about other parts of her life began to come up almost in passing. At first, they didn’t seem related to her job anxieties. One week, she mentioned a book chosen by her book club and how little interest she had in reading it. Another time, she talked about hosting a dinner party after a long day at work. Later, there were groceries to buy, along with some vague irritation and anxiety about the cookies she had forgotten to make for her daughter’s Girl Scout meeting, where she was the troop leader.

Gradually, I began to wonder where June herself was in all of this. She had a demanding career and remained involved with her daughter, her friends, and a larger community. But I rarely heard her speak about any of it with much pleasure. She sounded busy and responsible, but also oddly absent from herself. Her anxiety was most visible at work, but the lack of pleasure I was sensing was not confined to work.

Then it happened. We were talking about whether June wanted to ask her boss for more time on a project when, out of the blue, she asked me, “What do you think I should do?” Her question made sense, even as it pulled me out of my deeper listening state and into the directness of what she was asking. She had a hard decision to make, and who better to ask than the person she had come to for help? But given what had begun to emerge in our recent sessions, her question no longer felt like it was about work alone. I felt compelled to respond, but also uneasy that if I did, I might become the voice she used in place of her own.

This was part of the difficulty of the moment. If I answered too quickly, I might ease her anxiety for a little while, but I might also move us away from understanding why the question was so difficult for her to answer without my help. I did not want June to feel abandoned in the silence between us, but I also did not want to rush in and relieve her of the work that seemed to be emerging.

“That is a very good question, June,” I remember saying. “Before I answer it, can we stay for a moment with what happens inside you when you imagine asking your boss for more time? And maybe also what happens here, between us, when I do not answer right away?” The work was to stay with her near the heart of her question, so we could begin to understand what made it so hard for her to answer for herself.

In the sessions that followed, June began to speak more directly about the worry behind her question. If she did not know the answer herself, she feared I would become frustrated, then angry, and eventually decide she was not making enough progress to continue our work. A similar fear appeared with her boss. If she needed more time, or did not already know what to do, she imagined disappointment turning into rejection.

June later shared, with visible hesitation, that her mother died when she was ten, and that six months later her father, who struggled with alcohol, sent her to live with her mother’s grandparents. Years later, in her late twenties, she found herself in painful relationships with older men who first seemed loving, but later accused her of being too needy or emotionally fragile when tension entered the relationship, before ending things abruptly.

June’s question, then, was not only about asking for more time on a project. It was about what happened inside her when she did not already know what she wanted or needed, or what someone else expected from her. Knowing what I thought, or what her boss wanted, made her feel less anxious because it gave her a clearer sense of what was being asked of her.

Turning inward did not at first help June find a clear, calm voice. It brought her back to the old fear that her needs would make her too much, and that being too much would mean being abandoned again. As June began to recognize this, her fear did not disappear, but it became clearer why answering from any real sense of what she wanted for herself was so difficult.

June’s dilemma gets at one of the harder aspects of learning how to become more fully ourselves: figuring out how to stay with the parts of us we would rather turn away from. The difficulty is not merely that these parts are painful. It is that even when we begin to recognize them, we often do not know what to do next, other than try to make them easier to bear or less present within us.

I can appreciate the desire to move away from the parts of ourselves that make us uncomfortable. But if the only aim is to make the discomfort go away, we may miss what these parts of us are trying to show us about how we live and who we take ourselves to be. At some point, the question becomes whether they have too much say in how we live, and whether we can work with them without trying to make them, and ourselves, disappear.

The work, then, is not simply to make these parts of us less present, but to be with ourselves, even when we are uncomfortable, long enough to understand what our emotions are connected to. It can also help us notice when an emotional response is tied to the past, and when the present needs more careful attention. For June, this meant recognizing that her fear was not only about her boss. She needed to slow down enough to ask herself what she wanted, before trying to figure out what someone else expected of her.

Eventually, we come up against a difficult question: how do we recognize what is most deeply our own without allowing distress to become the center of our inner life? Because this question is not easy to answer, we may need time alone with ourselves, listening for what begins to feel important. This may happen in prayer, meditation, or on a long walk in nature, when we have enough room to notice what feels compelling and what nourishes our soul. The balance is difficult: giving proper attention to what is painful without losing sight of what restores our sense of vitality.

This is often where finding our own voice begins: not with speaking to others, though this has its place, but with learning to listen to ourselves clearly enough to recognize what is deeply important to us. We may first notice this through the parts of our emotional life that keep drawing our attention. At first, it may come less as a fully formed thought than as a change in how we experience ourselves: a feeling that we are no longer standing outside ourselves, waiting for life to be explained to us, but beginning to inhabit it more directly.

In this regard, such moments can feel significant because they often mark a change in our relationship to our own experience. What is happening inside us may begin to feel more immediate and more personal, and we may want to understand why it speaks to us. This is part of how our voice can begin to form: through a growing ability to take our own experience seriously.

For June, this began with the mixed feelings she had about hosting dinner parties. She loved the idea of spending a warm evening with friends, but hated what seemed to come with it. She had grown up watching her mother treat dinner parties as rare occasions that had to come off just right, with favorite dishes prepared and every detail in place. We helped June pay attention to what she wanted, so she could have an evening she enjoyed without feeling controlled by what she imagined everyone else expected from her. She preferred to dress casually, make it a potluck, and leave her mother’s fine china in the cabinet.

On the surface, June’s choice may seem modest, even ordinary, but it points toward a larger question: how do we begin to make room for what feels genuinely our own? We often begin to notice our own voice in smaller ways, through a preference or wish we have overlooked, often for reasons of self-protection. Like June, we may need to notice what helps us feel more present and able to enjoy ourselves, while learning what it is like to explore an interest that feels satisfying and ours alone to discover. From there, a harder question begins to emerge: how do we begin to build a life around our voice when we are only beginning to recognize it?

Over time, we want to figure out who we are apart from those around us. This matters because there is no shortage of people willing to tell us how they think we should live. Their voices can begin to sound like the truth before we have had enough time to explore who we are and what we actually like about life.

These two questions—who am I, and what do I like about life?—lead us toward another, more reflective one: what feels different when we are not simply absorbing other people’s ideas about how life should be lived? No one else can answer this for us, and many of us spend years trying to understand it. At different points in life, we may need time with ourselves before we can recognize what feels meaningful, and not merely familiar, to us. It is a question that troubles even the wisest among us.

The question, then, is not only how we find our voice, but how we enter a deeper relationship with ourselves over time. Part of this process involves noticing what captures our interest, then returning to it so we can better understand why it holds our attention. When we return in this way, we may notice where we feel more connected and more present.

We are not born with a finished self, and we do not come to know who we are by thinking harder alone. This is part of the irony of human life: becoming ourselves requires more than thought by itself, but the question of who we are still has to be answered by us over time. What we encounter outside our own mind can change us and help us understand ourselves, but it cannot finally tell us who we are.

Some of what we encounter may even become part of us: our parents’ love and attention, the goals and values we were raised with, or the expectations placed upon us. But they do not become truly ours simply because we inherit them. They have to be taken up, thought about, worked with, questioned, and made our own in ways that fit us and belong more fully to us. The work of becoming ourselves remains ours to live with, and often requires us to keep returning to the question of what we can honestly claim as our own.

Once we begin to recognize a way of being that feels closer to who we would like to become, another question begins to arise: what are we now responsible to, given what we have begun to understand? This responsibility is partly to ourselves and to the work of developing our own voice, which often begins through what we feel moved to explore more deeply in life.

Early in life, however, this responsibility can be hard to see clearly, especially before we have lived enough to know what will hold our attention over time. We often have to experiment before we know which interests we want to explore more deeply and hold onto. Our interests do not simply tell us what we like; over time, they can also shape who we become. Thus, our voice develops not only through self-reflection, but through what we continue to explore.

This brings us to one of the deeper ironies of becoming ourselves: we have some say in what we spend time with, but not in the fact that we have to spend time with ourselves. This is why what we choose to spend time with is so important: it does not merely occupy our time; over time, it helps form the person we become and have to live with. This becomes more personal when we begin to ask how we bring our voice into what we take up in life. For instance, if I want to become a more kind, patient, and loving person, then what I take up and take in over time is of the utmost importance.

But eventually there comes a time when I must put all my well-worn books back on the shelf, walk out into the world, and be kind in spirit to those I encounter along the way. In this way, kindness is no longer solely an idea I understand or admire; it becomes a living, immediate experience that takes shape in how I treat myself and those around me. Finding my voice, then, does not mean merely retreating into myself; it means learning how to remain connected to myself while staying in relationship with those around me, and meeting the world without leaving myself behind.

Part of becoming myself means discovering whether what I value can become part of how I actually live. Otherwise, I may never know firsthand what kindness feels like, whether it fits me, or whether it belongs in the life I am trying to live.

Thus, finding our own voice requires a kind of playing around with and testing out what we value in life. The same is true of patience, courage, or anything else we want to understand more fully. This cannot be known ahead of time, or through words and ideas alone. What we value has to meet the actual circumstances of our lives before we can understand what it means for us.

This process also changes as we move through different phases of life. Over time, we begin to understand more clearly which circumstances deepen our voice, and which ones pull us away from what feels more true to us. Kindness, patience, courage, and love do not generally take the same form when we are young as they do when we are older, especially as we become responsible to more than ourselves.

This means the inner work of finding our voice, and learning how to live in closer relationship to it, never fully ends. To build a life around our own voice may be one of the most difficult and meaningful achievements of our life. And yet this also means letting go of other possibilities we may long for along the way. Even as we choose certain paths and let others go, we do not become finished products, nor do we stop changing. Perhaps this is part of what it means to become more fully ourselves: not to try to live every life we ever imagined, but to keep bringing more of ourselves into the life we are already living.

This essay is part of my larger work on the Wellbeing Equation, where I look at how we build a life that supports our mental and emotional health over time. Here, I’m especially interested in how finding our own voice helps us understand what belongs in our life, what we may need to let go of, and what helps us feel more present and alive.

For readers who want to go further into the question of how we come to know what is true within ourselves, my paid essay, On Inward Knowing and What Becomes Ours, explores this related theme more fully.

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