Young female legs walking towards the sunset on a dirt road

Have you ever looked in the mirror and didn’t quite recognize your own reflection? Did you wake up one day realizing that you’ve become a stranger in your own world? Have you ever felt lost and confused about everything surrounding you? This is, my friend, the day you’ll embark on your journey of self discovery…

Who am I?
As we get older, we meet new people and get exposed to new societies. We start to question everything around us, starting from the habits we grew up with, to society’s conceptions of what’s right and wrong. We find ourselves, like everyone else, running in a vicious circle. A circle of a traditional lifetime routine, that we see everyone following blindly with only mild variations. Here’s when we pause and start to wonder if we really want to follow this routine. Here’s when we start the journey of discovering who we really are.
We travel, read, work, smoke, pray, party, love and hate. We start to try new things, seek new adventures, explore the universe, and see the world from different perspectives. We hate some of our actions, and regret others. We like some of the experiences and value others. We start to discover our hobbies and our interests. We start developing some skills, while losing others. After all the struggle, loss and confusion, we finally succeed in knowing who we really are.

Why am I here?
After figuring out who the hell we are, comes the harder part. The part where we decide what we want to do in this life and how we really want to live it. Some might easily find their purpose in life, while others really struggle to get there. Some people simply follow the vicious circle of the traditional routine: going to school, getting to college (the one their parents choose, or the one dictated by their own grades) and finally, settling down and getting married; while others do their best to get out of the norm, and live the life they have in mind.
To know why you’re here, or discover your real purpose in this life, you may hit many walls, fall and trip so many times. Although every experience leaves a scar, you actually learn a valuable lesson from it. As days pass, you get there, you succeed, you find your passion, you find the one thing that makes you actually feel alive. You find your purpose, and for the first time, you feel relieved. You feel worthy.

What’s right and what’s wrong?
Society always dictates what’s right and what’s wrong. You’ve been raised to blindly consent to some rules, in order to stay on the safe side and be accepted by society even though some of them make absolutely no sense to you. Here’s when you pause and start questioning those rules. You get stuck in confusion and distress as you lose track of what’s acceptable and what’s not. Eventually, you find out that every person is setting their own rules, that the rights and wrongs cannot be written down in a list and applied to every human being on this earth.
You find that your parents have raised you to follow their own list of rights and wrongs, and most probably, you won’t be okay with most of the list. As generations change, mentalities change, and the list changes; you start to set your own rules depending on your point of view. Mostly, you will be opposed by society, your parents and some of your friends. But does it mean that you’re following a wrong path? Or simply a different one? That’s a question that will keep popping every time you take a step forward.

Finally, after finding an answer to those three questions, you jump to the next phase. You keep circling in this blender of life, trying to find the right people to surround yourself with, the right job that fulfills your purpose, and the right place you feel comfortable in. Unfortunately, you never hit it right from the first time. Yet, every time you make the wrong choice, you either gain a new skill or learn a new lesson, which in both cases enriches your journey of self discovery..