You lose yourself by compromising. At first it’s just the little things – the dish you didn’t care for at dinner or the night you didn’t want to go out. But in time it turns into bigger things – the career path you could have followed or the journey you could have taken, if you hadn’t had that person or that situation or that one obstacle in the way. You don’t make active, conscious compromises but you allow opportunities to slip on your radar without a second thought – which you would have, in another world, jumped on. Which may make you more you.
You lose yourself if you listen too much to what everyone else is saying. You let your family tell you what job you should work, your friends tell you who you should date and the television tells you what to wear and how to act all the time. You pass a meaningless checkpoint with a sense of indifference and you’re not sure where you’ve taken your passion. You lose yourself when you let other people decide who you will be and you end up being their second rate version instead of the first rate version of you.
You lose yourself when you forget to make decisions – when the limitless nature of options sends you into a paralysis that forces you to make no choices at all. If you’re undecided it’s your default mode because taking the affirmative action seems obvious and you’d rather leave your options open. You lose yourself when running from choice becomes the only choice you make and is what leaves you powerless.
You lose yourself if you refuse to be hard on yourself. When the concept of ‘self-love’ goes too far and strays into the realm of making you someone you can’t respect. You allow yourself to take a few steps here, a few steps out there and suddenly your whole life bleeds into a giant excuse not to try. You don’t want to be rough on yourself or harsh on yourself and you are your best friend, right? So you let yourself cry when you need to be sad and stay at home when you don’t feel like going out and suddenly you’re the person who never leaves your room or does things and you’re not sure what happened to the person you used to be.
You lose yourself if you refuse to commit. You project all your problems onto the world instead of asking yourself how to solve them. You focus on the pit of your problems and tell yourself that it’s because it’s not your fault, and it’s not your responsibility. And so you live with those issues until they become the core of who you are. And you wonder when the world will cut you off.
You lose yourself. You accidentally lose yourself. You lose yourself in a series of small, invisible moments that lead you away from the person you wanted to be. You lose yourself passively and unintentionally. You lose yourself in the pursuit of not confusing everything.
There are an endless number of ways we distance ourselves from the people we would like to be and almost none of them are born on purpose. We tend to make the easy choice, the right choice or the right choice rather than the choice we would like to see happen. It seems harmless day by day and yet it grows over the years: it extends into every imaginable part of our lives. One day we wake up and realize that ten years have passed since the day we graduated or we decided to quit that dead job and where should we go? Who are we? What daily decisions have brought us to this point where we don’t understand the life we planned to live?
We have to be more aware of the endless little moments that rob us. Every chance we don’t take, every move we don’t make, every time we walk the line of “Why not,” and “Why bother” and end up deciding on the latter. These are the small moments that rob us of what could be the biggest changes in our lives. And in order to find ourselves and be in the middle of it all, we have to start making those small, tiny choices that turn everything on its head.
It’s a compromise we don’t want to agree to. He decides not to take the advice. The moments you force yourself to leave instead of beating yourself up and the opportunities you don’t let pass you by. Just as you lose yourself slowly and unintentionally, you find yourself that way, too. He reinvents himself. You redefine yourself. You make a series of small, risky choices that reverse the direction you’re headed. And slowly, unconsciously, you find your way back to you.
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