I Hope Someday You’re Ready To Meet Yourself

It is really hard to win a game if you do not know the goal. You can be making every shot, but if you’re shooting on the wrong basket, you’re not going to be happy when that buzzer goes off and the game is over.

On New Year’s Eve, people think about their goals and what they want. They make a list and maybe even think about how they’ll accomplish what’s on their list. Maybe, they even act on it for a while. Inevitably though, most people forget about it by February.

Some people think about their goals when they are about to make a big life decision like moving, getting a new job, changing relationship status. In these clutch moments, we ask the all important questions of what we want.

There are two problems with this pattern. First, by the time these clutch moments roll around, it’s too late. Second, you cannot possibly know what you want if you don’t know who you are.

This brings us to our title question, have you met you yet?

We get sucked into the world moving from thing to thing, task to task, place to place, worrying what to wear, what we’ll say, how we’ll get there. We fill our time with hypnotizing and numbing ourselves with TV, social media, alcohol, drugs, you name your vice. What’s missing in that picture is you- the real you, your soul.

The real you is not wondering what to wear so that they’ll like you and the real you is not mindlessly scrolling Instagram. The real you is inside you, filled with real thoughts and real dreams and begging to come out, but you can’t hear it because everything else is so damn loud.

You meet yourself the way you’d expect to get to know someone new: commitment and time. You wouldn’t expect (I hope) to sit down with someone for one hour and know everything about them; so you can’t expect that about yourself either.

In fact, since you are the only one who can meet the real you, it’s going to be tough to break through. You have layers and layers you have to peel away before you can meet your soul. The layers are made up of all of the things you were told you were supposed to be, all of the things you have picked up from your world, consciously and subconsciously. The layers are thick and they won’t want to be moved.

But meeting what lies beneath them is worth it. Here’s why:

Once you crack through to your core, your soul, you meet the real and authentic you. The real and authentic you is quite honestly, the shit. This beautiful being does not care about what anybody thinks. They don’t numb out because why would they when life is so amazing?! They have dreams bigger than you ever imagined and they don’t worry that they won’t come true; they don’t obsess over how they will achieve them.

Your soul knows it is divine and it knows it is abundant, so once you let it out, it will go to bat and fight against anything that says otherwise. Sure, things may come up that hurt your ego or bruise your heart, and in those moments, because your soul is out in the open, it will stand up to those things and you will be okay.

See, it is not enough to ask what you want when facing a big decision because you don’t even know who you’re asking. It’s like if you -a total stranger- asked me if I think you’d be happy taking this new job or entering this new relationship with no background whatsoever…of course I cannot answer that for you because I don’t know you. I hate to break it to you, but I bet you don’t know you either. You’re making decisions based on things you were taught about what you’re supposed to be. You’re playing the game based on someone else’s rules. And so guess what? You’re not going to win.

You have to meet yourself, little by little, every day. There are plenty of different ways to do it and I think you should try a bunch until you find what works. You can journal, you can sit in silence, you can ask yourself questions, you can do this walking, you can talk out loud… what matters is that the goal is to meet yourself. The goal is to uncover your soul. Not once a year, not when you need an answer, but every day, you ask these questions:

Who am I really? What do I really care about? What do I really want? What would I do if there were no rules? What if I could make my own rules?

Eventually, you get answers. When you meet yourself, you get to uncover what game you really want to play. When you know the real you, you don’t have to worry about anyone else’s rules because all you want to do is be authentically you. Eventually, you realize that this game that you’re playing is your game. You do make the rules and because you make the rules, you know the rules, and when you’re playing your game by your rules, there is no way you cannot win.