YOU ARE NOT THE PERSON YOU THINK YOU ARE

Most people believe they know who they are

They know their personality, their strengths, their weaknesses, their history, and all the things that have happened to them

They can tell you why they struggle with relationships, why they don’t trust people, why they become anxious, or why they’ve never felt good enough

And much of what they tell you will make perfect sense

But there’s something extraordinary about this that we rarely stop to consider

Almost everything you know about yourself comes from memory

Things people said about you
Experiences you had
Conclusions you reached
Stories you’ve repeated so many times that you no longer experience them as stories

You experience them as yourself

Perhaps someone made you feel unwanted as a child

At some point, the experience became a belief
“I’m unwanted”

And over the years, you began to see the world through that belief

You noticed rejection where others might not

You struggled to receive love

You found yourself drawn into relationships that seemed to confirm what you already knew

Eventually, you stopped questioning whether you were unwanted

It was simply who you were

But consider something

The original experience happened
The pain was real
Yet the conclusion you reached about yourself was a thought

And somehow, that thought became an identity

Now here’s where it gets interesting

If you can become aware of a thought about yourself, can that thought actually be who you are?

You can notice the belief that you’re inadequate

You can observe the memory of being rejected

You can even see the entire story you’ve constructed about your life

So what is it that’s aware of all these things?

And could it be that what you fundamentally are has never been contained within any of the descriptions you’ve accumulated?

We spend so much of our lives trying to improve the person we believe ourselves to be

Trying to become more confident, more lovable, more secure, more worthy

But there’s another possibility

That freedom begins when we discover we were never quite the person we thought we were

And that the one who has spent a lifetime trying to become enough was never the whole of who we are