You Will Never Actually Find Yourself

The other day my best friend said that he wanted me to “Find Tom,” aka myself.

He said he wanted me to accomplish what I originally set out for last June on the 12,000 mile road trip that changed my entire life around.

It got me thinking..

Did I actually do it?

After all I went through last Summer, did I find myself through it all?

Sadly, and probably contrary to what you all might think, the answer is no.

It turns out that finding yourself is actually a pretty lofty goal–impossible, even. It’s impossible because we’re constantly evolving. Finding ourselves is like trying to hit a moving target that’s always getting farther and farther away.

The more we chase it, the more we can’t get to it.

It’s weird to think of it that way, right?

Sometimes we get pretty good glances, though. Sometimes (and here’s where it gets weird) we can creep up on our wild selves (yes, our actual selves are animals in this scenario) chillin’ in some random ass pasture we never would’ve guessed they’d be in.

Then we look around and realize how awesome that place really is.

“Well, it does have a nice lake over there,” we say. “And the sun does hit the mountains just right,” we continue.

The point is we never know who we are because we’re too damn busy to look around. Our subconscious is always one step ahead of us. It’s always beckoning us forward. Some people listen, and some people don’t.

Look, nobody actually finds themselves, but the thing is that not everybody actually tries, either.

Trying.

Trying means you’re unsure if you can get to it, but you have the guts to attempt it.

“Oh, I’m out there somewhere,” we say.

It’s not until we get there that we realize we can’t actually catch it.

That wild thing that seems to have eluded us our whole lives.

Our parents say we need to go to college to find ourselves. It doesn’t work that way. We can only attempt to find ourselves when we turn off the world and decide to do what we WANT to do.

Unashamed.

No fear.

You can’t find yourself when you want to go left at the fork in the road and someone else persuades you to go right. Because down the left side, just around the bend, is that wild thing walking around in the woods that is yourself.

“I can’t believe it’s here,” we say. We never can.

We really don’t want to be found, I’m convinced.

Because that would defeat the entire purpose.

The purpose of life is many things to many people, but one of them is to catch ourselves in a bottle and wave it around at other people saying “Look at me! I got it!”

The realization that you can’t find yourself is one of those things you can’t possibly see until you’ve tried. Like, you can’t possibly know whether you can bake a decent cake until you’ve tried, right?

There’s an easier metaphor to understand for you.

I haven’t found myself. I don’t intend to anymore. But what I do intend to do is catch a few awesome glances of it every now and then. A few bigfoot-esque pictures, as one would say.

I intend to let my real self stay wild. I’ll follow it wherever it leads me. To the ends of the earth. To the ends of Arches National Park, to the cliffs of Glacier National Park, and to the gates of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Tom is out there somewhere.

I glimpse him every now and then.

But I don’t plan on catching him, or truly finding him anytime soon.

He’s much too wild for that.

Tom is a full-time Digital Nomad who also edits The Post-Grad Survival Guide, a Medium publication dedicated to helping recent graduates navigate life after college. To find out how Tom travels and works remotely, download his ebook called “You Work Where?” for more information.