Why Am I?

What makes us the person we are? Have you considered why you are the person you’ve become? How do we develop into the characters we display to those around us? How do our experiences shape us, for better or worse? And can anyone ever truly understand us? Can we?

There are 7.8 billion people across the world and each and every single one of us is unique. No two of us have experienced our lives in the same way as another and our experiences will form the way we think, feel, and behave. Even when we share a significant event with someone else, we may process it in a very different way to them and potentially take away an entirely different viewpoint.

You may have heard the term “we all have a book in us” and it would likely be fascinating to read the stories of our friends and families and have the tale told of why they have become the person we know today. But could we fully comprehend the intricate and extensive piecing together of another’s personality, or indeed our own?

Have you ever wondered how your story would sound to those around you? Have you ever told parts of your story out loud and found enlightenment within your own words? Reasons you respond in certain ways to particular situations based on earlier experiences? Clarity around why you might be so shy or confident, narcissistic or full of empathy for others, childlike or so fiercely independent?

The brain is a complex system and will do its absolute best to protect us from harm. Unfortunately this can generate unhealthy coping mechanisms when we’re unsure of how to manage difficult situations we haven’t come across before, particularly through childhood and adolescence whilst the brain is still developing and complex situations occur. These behaviours then become our ‘go to’ reaction to challenging events as we move into and through adulthood, and again, each individual will find different ways of coping based on both the internal and external resources they have at hand at the time they need them.

We can come to believe that we are simply a person who has an addiction, who self-harms, who has an eating disorder, who is suicidal, who is depressed, who is anxious, who is a risk taker, who procrastinates, who is a people pleaser…and so on. We believe that’s just who we are, who we’ve become and we can hold the firm belief that we will never be any different. 

The question though has to be why? Why am I addicted? Why do I feel the need to self-harm? Why do I feel the need to binge eat or control my food intake? Why do I feel like taking my own life? Why do I feel so low? Why am I so fearful? Why do I put myself in danger? Why do I find it so difficult to motivate myself? Why do I put others’ needs before my own? Etc etc.

To examine our very being, to ask ourselves why, is to establish a much deeper understanding of the person we have become, and in our understanding we can decide whether to accept it, or not. 

Only when we’ve explored the why can the question become ‘who?’ Who do I want to be?

If we’ve become this person because of our experiences, we can create new methods of meeting our own needs and challenge ourselves to respond differently, to change the core of the personality we are presenting, to create a healthier way of being based on our individual desires of who we’d like to be.

It is never too late to change your responses to triggers, to ‘teach’ your brain new ways of thinking, to feel differently about yourself and the world you live in, to carve out a new ‘you.’

Our lives aren’t stagnant and as such we are adapting all the time, we are learning new things every day, about the world we live in, and about what’s important to us. There is no choice but to change when our behaviours no longer serve our needs, and we all have the capacity to invoke change where there is a more immediate need for this to take place, we just have to make sure we are changing for the better and improving our view of the potential within us to be the person we dream of being.