There are a lot of voices in our heads that sound remarkably like our own.
You should probably be doing more. You should have figured this out by now. You used to be better at this. Everyone else seems to know what they’re doing. This is what someone your age should want. This is what success looks like. This is what your body should look like. This is where you should be by now.
Somewhere along the way, we hear these things often enough that we stop questioning where they came from. They just become part of the running commentary in our heads.
And wow, it can get really LOUD in there.
We’ve been talking quite a bit about evolving. About allowing ourselves to want something different and recognizing strength we may not have known we had. But there’s another part of evolving that I think matters just as much.
How do we know which direction is actually ours?
One of our teachers, Lori W., put it this way: “Remember who you are just reminds me to cut the noise out and to come back to my roots.”
Cut the noise.
I keep thinking about that, because there is so much of it. Of course there’s the obvious noise. Social media. Advertising. The endless stream of other people’s lives coming at us through a screen. Opinions we never asked for. Advice we weren’t looking for. An entire world ready to tell us what we should buy, eat, wear, achieve, fix, and become. But the more I think about it, I’m not sure that’s the hardest noise to turn down.
Honestly, the harder noise might be the stuff we’ve been carrying for so long that we no longer recognize it as someone else’s voice. It becomes ours. Expectations we inherited. Definitions of success we never chose. Ideas about our bodies we learned when we were young. Roles we became really good at playing. The versions of us that other people became comfortable with. Some of those things may still belong to us. Some may not.
Remembering who you are isn’t about finding some earlier version of yourself and trying to become that person again. We change. We’re supposed to. The people we love change us. The places we go change us. The things that happen to us change us. Sometimes we make a choice and don’t realize until much later how much it changed us, and it’s really easy to hold on to the versions of ourselves we recognize. The responsible one. The strong one. The busy one. The one who always says yes. The one who has it together. The one who has been doing the same thing for twenty years and is really good at it.
Maybe some of the noise comes from trying so hard to stay recognizable, even to ourselves.
What if remembering who you are doesn’t require holding on quite so tightly? What if we could hold some of it a little more lightly? Notice what still feels true. Let something change when it changes. Trust that becoming someone a little different doesn’t mean we’ve somehow lost ourselves. Maybe remembering who you are isn’t about staying the same. Maybe it’s knowing what matters enough to carry with you while you change.
We see this on the mat too. Walk into a pose you’ve done hundreds of times. It’s easy to arrive with that story already written. I’m good at this one. I hate this one. My balance is terrible. My hips don’t do that. I should be able to go deeper. Sometimes the body hasn’t even had a chance to tell us what’s happening today before the commentary begins.
What happens if we get quiet enough to find out?
Not to erase everything we know about ourselves, or to pretend our history doesn’t matter. Just to notice what is actually true now. The things you still love when nobody is watching. The people around whom you don’t have to perform. The work that matters even when nobody applauds it. The parts of yourself that keep resurfacing no matter how many times you get distracted by something shinier.
Maybe those are our roots. Not something that keeps us exactly where we are, but something that allows us to grow without losing our connection to ourselves. And I think that matters as we talk about evolving loudly, because evolution can become its own kind of noise. That voice that tells us that there’s MORE. Something to fix. Another person we think we’re supposed to become. A new version of you.
Full stop.
Maybe we don’t need to become anything today. Maybe we can get quiet enough to notice what is already here. What still feels like us. What doesn’t anymore. What we’re holding onto simply because it’s familiar. What we might be ready to hold a little more lightly.
Remembering who you are doesn’t stop you from changing. It just might be what lets you change without losing yourself.
So, here’s something to notice this week.
When you turn down all the voices telling you who you should be, what can you hear that still sounds like you?