Finding Yourself is Great, Losing Yourself is Better
Identity is a funny thing.
As a small child you probably never worried about it. As long as you had a good home with good parents, your identity flowed completely from being loved by them.
Sometime during your schooling days you started to crave the approval of others besides your parents. By middle school, this was so extreme that you might have even begun to push your parents away (“mom, don’t come in with me, that’s so embarrassing.”)
This phase of your life likely lasted through college, and so between middle school, high school, and college, you probably had three shots at establishing yourself among your peers.
Chances are around this time you started looking to lots of external things to forge your identity. Listening to certain kinds of music, wearing certain clothes, decorating your room with certain types of posters.
We can all look back and clearly see what was happening. It’s so obvious that every move we made was staged to influence the opinions of other people.
Of course, many of our decisions still have similar motivations, but we are less obvious about it than when we were in high school.
There’s a subtle shift that happens as you transition into adulthood. You still want to establish an…
