This Is How You’ll Find Yourself

Brandon Woelfel

You will find yourself on the days in which you stop seeking perfection.

For it is in these pure moments of imperfection and clarity that you are the most exposed, the rawest. Perfection is too simplistic. Perfection has no color. Perfection has no pattern, or no depth. It is a plain black and white page in a story book. The lines are all straight, measurable, and errorless, making right angles and perfect shapes. You can look at this story book page, but only for so long, before you run out of thoughts or interpretations. There is nothing else to draw from it.

But it is on the next page, the page with glowing colors and floating shapes, that you will truly be intrigued. This beautiful mess will catch your eye, this scramble of ideas and thoughts blotted across the page will reach your heart. You will wonder why the two lines don’t match up, and why the coloring is just vaguely outside the lines. Your imagination will begin to run wild with thoughts, with emotions, with questions…as you track the wandering lines and swirls contrasting against the white backdrop. For this is imperfect. This is beautiful. This makes you feel something.

Finding yourself means seeing mistakes on the page, but interpreting them as hidden aspects of awe. Hidden bits of romance. Hidden drops of stardust. You will find yourself when you uncover your imperfections, and bravely send them out into the world.

You will find yourself in the moments when the tears come streaming down your face, when your heart has been broken. You will also find yourself in the depths of your deepest despair when you realize that this time, you have broken your own heart. It is in these moments of pure emotional expression that your soul will reveal itself; that your heart will pound in sadness or happiness at the terror of being alive. For it is in the moments when you truly embrace sensitivity as strength, rather than shying away in fear, that you will be in touch with your heart.

When you feel everything so deeply, when your emotions come rushing through you like a powerful ocean wave knocking you down, you will know who you are. You will open up. You may come out as a different person, but this is the person you have braved the storm to become. Sensitivity teaches you who you are. It brings out your strengths during your darkest days, and intensifies your passion when beauty shows its face.

After all, love is measured in quality, not quantity. You can impact this world through how deeply you love. You will find yourself when you choose to love even when your heart is cracked open…and when you make that choice to continue to love even when your pain is overbearingly intense. If you close your heart off when you are hurting, you will be lost, and not found. You will be hiding away from joy and miracles. So to find yourself, you must put all of your strength into knocking walls down, rather than building them up.

You will find yourself even on the days when you wake up with tear sunken eyes and a worn out heart…on the days when you are exhausted and worn out, when you are broken and alone. You will find yourself when you accept that it’s okay that you feel this way, because this pain is fleeting. These bad times will not last forever. The ache in your heart will get better with time. It is when you can truly believe that heartache is temporary, that you will find a shadow of strength deep down within you that will continue to push you forward. Even though you have fallen, you will still rise back up again.

Even when you are broken, you will still be mended. If you continue to hold on, you will be surprised at what wonder you may find just around the corner. So remember that each time you fall down, you will find new facets of your complex soul. You will find different bits of peace and strength to comfort your heavy heart.

Finding yourself is not a concrete journey; it’s not a destination. There will never be a time in which you will feel like you have reached your final self. This is because you are deeper than the great blue ocean and vaster than even outer space. You will never be found. You will always be a little bit lost. And this is okay. This is only human.

You will find new bits and pieces of yourself as you go. The key is to peel aside all of your delicate layers of beauty and purity to see what lies beneath.

As you uncover these secrets, these vulnerabilities, these seeds of courage, you will begin to find yourself. You will realize that you alone have something to offer to this world. You alone have an exquisite beauty that is unlike anything else in this world. So continue on your journey, and remember that piece by piece, you will find yourself on the untouched road ahead. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

“there can be magic in the messes” @apeaceofwerk

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