I often think about Jemima Kirke’s funny response to the question someone sent her on Instagram: I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much. I’ve quoted this back to myself from time to time because I think it’s funny and often true – most of us are guilty of spiralling a bit too much sometimes about things that we’d be better off not thinking about at all. Sometimes, the answer really could be to just stop focusing on yourself so much.
I find that a lot of the things that make us feel most alive, take us out of our state of overthinking and self-awareness – things like dancing, having a fascinating conversation with someone, falling in love, you name it. They’re things that are as good as they are because they allow us to forget almost everything else for a moment and to be entirely present. And when we’re entirely present and immersed in something, we’re not overthinking or focusing on how we look at that moment, on whether what we said earlier was a bit weird, on all the things we could be doing differently.
That much, I believe. But I also very deeply believe in the fact that the key to unlocking a life that is as fulfilling, as happy as possible, is real self-awareness and full self-understanding. Deep honesty about all the parts of yourself that you’d often rather ignore, or about parts that people spend their whole lives never admitting or allowing themselves to see.
I sometimes joke that maybe I’m introspective to a fault – I don’t actually believe it is a bad thing though, because I owe everything to that trait: the happiness I’ve been able to build for myself, the life I have designed entirely unconventionally but in a way that truly works for me. The way that I’ve been able to shed most preconceptions and limiting beliefs I had around what I could / should be doing in my life, what decisions to make, and what is possible for me. And the reason why I value it so much is that I didn’t always have it.
For most of my life, I used to look at other people for answers about what I should be doing because I didn’t trust that I knew what was right for me. I hadn’t developed the self-trust and confidence that assures me today that the answers to what I need are actually inside of me, not outside. I made many decisions that people didn’t understand, and often judged, in my early 20s: starting a company with no funding when I was already working multiple jobs, leaving a long relationship that looked great on paper but actually felt completely wrong (losing multiple friends in the process), quitting jobs that paid really well because I saw signs that my own ventures and projects were actually working, and could make me happier.
The more I did it, the easier it became, but for a while, I would ask everyone around me what they thought I should do. I would hang on their every word and hope that someone would give me the answers that I knew deep down I wanted to hear. I thought I knew and understood myself, but I actually had no practice of self-understanding and introspection in my everyday life – I just expected that because I was me, I understood myself. I was completely wrong, and have now seen what life looks like when you become intentional about self-understanding.
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