Do you think you know yourself ?

We think we know people till we know otherwise. We think we know ourselves till we go on a trip to re-think and discover ourselves.

To say it out loud, knowing oneself well, to find what we like, love or detest; to know what we prefer or not, what rings a bell and why; is probably the single biggest part of our life that is left behind amidst all the rush of growing up.

Well not everything is so black and white in life either and it is all inter related but if I may say so, sometimes it is important to just cut the chase, ask yourself some questions and get to some objective answers to these to avoid taking grossly wrong directions(or just decisions taken with delusions about self).

Let us get to the social context of knowing self; We have all had situations in life, each one of us, when we expected something out of someone dear and that led to all sorts of problems. Expectations are nothing but reflections of our own identities in others.

We learn quickly(most of us) from situations and hard wire these early experiences as sort of a defence mechanism to not get ourselves into the same set of situations and that is how we begin to form our guards against how people could hurt us; hurt being an uneasy scenario our primal brain tries to avoid, almost like a responsiveness to external stimuli, kind of like an external known source of pain. 

All said and done, these experiences also shape the person we are subconsciously, but does that mean we know ourselves completely ? we do have experiences and can document them and ponder over them to internalize and understand the person we are but does that necessarily make us fully understand the person beneath and how we would react to newer complex situations ? probably not !

Most of us carry delusions about ourselves all life.

We form this image of our-self in our minds, sometimes what we would like to be or what we think we really are and keep believing that till we are contradicted and if lucky, we see through things. 

We tend to live with that image for far too long sometimes. A feedback occasionally could go a long way in clearing out some air though, but it depends.  

Friends, family speak what they see and that jolts us out of our dreamy world often, but it is important to accept it none the less.

For our near and dear ones, our kids for example, We have heard mothers harping on the fact that they know their kids so well, vouching for stuff that they have little clue of or so they believe they know of;

The truth is that they usually do not. It is less about communication and more about the self-discovery of a person about himself. We need not know all versions or facets of a person, even ones we raised. 

People learn, from society, surroundings, company, life, and mistakes- consciously and even subconsciously.

Let us take the pledge of not taking self-discovery for granted and go on a journey of knowing ourselves better, one trip, one feedback, one pre-conceived notion at a time. 

We learn and read all life; do we discover ourselves all life? We must!

When someone asks you where do you see yourself in a few years, it is sometimes more about what you think about yourself or whether you think enough about it rather than the empirical, imaginary extrapolation of events involving you & what you think would be a best guess of it.

Discover what you are, and you will see opportunities in abundance around you!

technoraiyan