self relationship & exploration

Perhaps a more productive framework, then, is to focus on the accuracy of our self-knowledge, also known as self-awareness. How close to reality is your understanding of yourself at this moment? To what extent are you deceiving yourself when you call yourself a loser, ugly, dumb, or the smartest person in the room? Do you know your values, and how... See more

Growing up, we turn to our parents, friends, teachers, and communities for guidance like our lives depend on it. Because it does. We have no idea yet how to live, how to learn, how to dress, how to be. Through being explicitly told what to do and implicitly observing what we should do, we learn to earn love and acceptance by living in accordance... See more

The quest for self-discovery implies there is a prize ending; a time you’ll be able to breathe out a sigh of relief, or jump up and down with excitement, or throw a party, or in some way acknowledge that you’ve finally done it: you’ve discovered yourself. But in practice, the quest never ends, because fully knowing oneself is impossible. This... See more

For most of my life, my decisions were driven by invisible shoulds which manifested as ambivalence. It’s not that I felt like I had no agency over my life, but I often felt indecisive at the trailhead of a big decision. I simply did not know myself well enough to make informed decisions on my own behalf. When I found myself at crossroads, it was... See more

So many high-achieving people get trapped into obsessing about the external world and neglecting their internal world. When you’ve been suppressing things for so long, you can’t just decide to stop all at once. Learning to listen to yourself takes a long time. I used to think that I always had to justify everything to myself—that I needed to be

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