Not because we wanted it to.
But because this is how we learned to exist.

In psychology, there is a term for the tension that comes from this.
The distance between who you think you should be and how your life actually feels.

The larger this gap becomes, the more uncomfortable it is to live inside yourself.

When what you do doesn’t match what you feel to be true, something starts to resist.
Not loudly. Not immediately.

Slowly.

We try to fix this discomfort the only way we know how — by improving.

We optimise.
We adjust.
We theorise ourselves.

We turn life into a problem that needs to be solved, instead of something that needs to be lived.

We start collecting traits, habits, ambitions, identities — borrowing them from people who look like they figured it out.

As if we were walking through a shopping mall, picking clothes without checking the size, the fit, or whether we even like them.

We put them on anyway.

And then we try very hard to make them feel like ours.

This is how misalignment grows.

We are busy becoming the right version of ourselves —
while quietly moving further away from ourselves.

And the strangest part is this:

From the outside, it often looks like progress.

Not only is it hard to find the answer, it is even harder not to try.

Because if you are not searching for your “who?”, then supposedly you do not have this “who” in you at all — at least, that’s the modern world’s untold “truth”.

Which means, if we read between the lines:
there is no you.
You are no one. Well. Until you become someone. Someone.

And so we fall into this pit of self-hatred, rolling around in it, regretting being so dull, so unfinished, so unremarkable.

Null.   

Yet asking yourself this question is, imho, exactly what creates this “you”-emptiness.

“Who am I?” most of the time projects the “you” outside of yourself.
It forces your gaze to slide away from what is deep within, towards what is out there.

You start searching for something that is not you.

And in this process, you skip the most important part of the equation.

You.

Don’t get me wrong.
Searching for yourself “outside” is also an important part of becoming this YOU.

But answering the question “Who am I?” often turns into pigeonholing yourself into expectations artificially created by someone.
Or by everyone at once.

Discovering YOU becomes an F1 race, where each of us is trying to reach “I am me, and I am the perfect representation of all these expectations” faster than everyone else.

And then! We are someone.

This has been a to-do item forming itself for decades and finally I am ready to puke it into paper. OR should I say into the server?

I've spent years on preparing myself, improving myself, building myself to be ready to be good enough for this. I thought, as a lot of us do, I needed something more than what I was already. Something that would prove to others, and most importantly, to me, that I am worth sharing my thoughts and experiences with whoever is on the other side of the screen. I blamed myself for not being enough, for not doing enough, for being lazy, tired and lost. I've been trying to urgently find myself in secret because I thought everyone else already did and I am so so late. And that no one should notice that. No one should know I am not ready, I am not worthy, I am not me, or that I am just me.

What I knew though was that I definitely had something in me. Actually, a lot of things. Things that I wanted to explore, to develop, to fetch from deep within me and share with the world. Something that was more than just "yeah, whatever, this is life, the life is this, and that is enough". Something that throughout my whole life murmured through the millimetres of my skins: Oh come one, you've always been ready. Just fucking do it. No one cares, and even if they do, do you care??? You are ready.
But. Am I ready? Am I worthy? Is just being me and doing what I already do is enough?

What I realised, these questions are total crap. There isn't such a thing.
There is just me and my desire. If I have one, I do not need to be ready. I just need to start. There are no rules, no "you have to", no correct ways of doing it. I do not need to change the way I am doing something to fit the known ways of doing things. I do not have to do it for anyone. I can just do it for myself, as I have been doing it this whole time, but just on a different level. Just the way I can and want to.

So consider this my first step on my own path of my own journey. Finally. Feels like I can breathe a bit better.