Me and the others / How can I get along better with myself and others?:

How do I find out who I am and what I want?

Many people are a bit of a stranger to themselves. Here you can find out why journaling helps you to get closer to yourself, why it's not a good idea to constantly adapt and why it's important to make mistakes.

What if I don't know myself?

You might ask yourself: "Who am I actually?" You're a bit of a stranger to yourself. Here are some tips on how to get to know yourself.

Gain experience, make mistakes

Practice is better than theory. It's clear that experience is an excellent way to get to know ourselves and find out what we want. We do something and we enjoy it. That is how we learn: "I like this". Or we learn that we don't like it. We decide to do something and realize afterwards that it was a bad decision. We are not wise in advance, but in hindsight.

The English writer Oscar Wilde said it well: "Experience is simply the name we give to our mistakes." And the great British statesman Winston Churchill said: "It is a great advantage in life to make the mistakes you can learn from as early as possible."

So don't wait for the moment when you make the perfect decision and take the right path, but allow yourself to make mistakes.

Do thought experiments

Imagine it's your 100th birthday and all your loved ones are with you. What do you want to see when you look back on your life? What do you want to stand for? What do you want people to appreciate about you? Questions like these bring you closer to what is important to you and what you want. Perhaps your ideas are still very vague. That's okay. With each year, with everything you do and experience, with every experience, you will become clearer about what you want and what you don't want.

Practice journaling

Writing is a great way to get in touch with yourself. Some people write daily, others write on a whim. Try out what works best for you. There really is no right or wrong way. Here are some ideas:

Write down what you're thinking right now. What's going through your mind. You might just write down words off the top of your head until a sentence emerges. So it can look pretty chaotic. You can also doodle or draw something. Nobody tells you what it should look like.
You have your diary as your counterpart, so to speak. That's why some people give their journal a name and start each diary entry with a salutation. Think about who or what this person you are writing to should be. Maybe it's someone you know. Maybe it's your grandmother who's no longer alive. Maybe it's a character you've made up. In this way, your journal can become a confidante.
It can also be interesting to record what's going on in your life. When you read it a year later, you might be surprised at how much further you have come. Or that a bad situation has passed. Or what you were afraid of and are no longer afraid of. Or what you decided to do and the experience you had with it. In other words, you get to know yourself better over time.
A journal can be a daily check-in with yourself: What are you thinking? What are you feeling? How is your body? What was good about your day? What was not? When did you feel competent, relaxed or alive? This will gradually give you a picture of the things that are important and beneficial to you.
Journaling gives you a better connection to your feelings. You can better figure out what they are trying to tell you. Because feelings are signposts. They tell you whether your needs, values and concerns are being met or violated. Even unpleasant feelings, such as envy, are helpful. Envy, for example, points out exactly what we want but don't have.

Try to conform less

It may be important for you to be accepted by others. You learn to be the way they want you to be. If you do this for a long time, you will turn down your sense of self. But it's not gone. You can turn it up again. Ask yourself why you are doing or thinking something. If the answer is: "Because they want to," or "Because that's the way it's supposed to be," or something like that, then ask yourself: "What would I want right now?" If the answer is: "I don't know," then that's honest.

Maybe you're afraid of losing people if you stop conforming all the time. Yes, that can happen. But the question is, are you really getting what you need from those people right now? Are you really getting that if you're not really showing them who you are? Or are they perhaps friends with a simulacrum? How close can someone really be to you if you're not real? How good does recognition feel when you've faked something?

We find: When people are open, honest, and authentic, it makes them attractive. People may turn away from you if they can't deal with the real "you". But you will find new people who like and appreciate you for who you really are.

Ask others

Ask your partner, your friends or your family how they see you. See how this corresponds with what you think of yourself.

Perhaps there are people you admire for their confidence or for the self-determined way they live their lives. Why don't you ask them how they came to live their lives the way they do? How they found their hobbies. How they developed their self-confidence. How they deal with insecurities.

Be aware that this person is different from you. It's not about becoming like them. You are unique and may need different things to be fulfilled. However, the experiences of others can help you to figure this out for yourself.