Why Finding Yourself Can Make Your Life Feel Like a Lie

Nobody warns you about what can happen when you finally start figuring out who you actually are.

They tell you self-knowledge is liberating. They tell you about the clarity, the relief, the sense of coming home to yourself. They are not wrong. For a while it is so profoundly liberating that you cry in your car and text people things like I finally feel like myself and mean it completely.

What they do not tell you is what comes next.😬

What comes next is that you start seeing everything you built before you knew:

• The career chosen because it was manageable rather than meaningful

• The relationships maintained by making yourself smaller and more palatable

• The careful architecture of a daily existence designed not around who you actually are but around who you needed to appear to be in order to get through without too much friction

You built a life optimized for a version of yourself you were performing without knowing you were performing it.

That is the part that takes your breath away.

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