Everyone wants to “find themselves.”
It’s the spiritual world’s version of a midlife crisis. Some people buy a Porsche, others buy a yoga mat and start hashtagging their selfies with “#healing.” Same dopamine hit, just fewer speeding tickets.
But the truth is, you don’t find your real self by running away from your life. You find it by walking straight into the fire of it.
The “authentic self” isn’t hiding in a cave, waiting for you to meditate enough, juice-cleanse enough, or sit through enough cacao ceremonies to finally be deemed worthy. It’s already here. Right under your skin. Buried beneath the noise, the bullshit lies you’ve been telling yourself, and the hundred masks you’ve been wearing since you were five years old trying to make someone love you.
And yes, it’s fuck ugly at first. Because self-awareness isn’t some blissful, Instagrammable glow.
It’s fucking grief.
It’s sitting in the quiet and realising how many years you’ve spent abandoning yourself. It’s looking at the insecure one, the angry one, the needy one, and saying, “Alright, you little fucker, you get a seat at the table too.”
Because wholeness isn’t about killing your demons.It’s about dragging them into daylight so they stop running your life in the dark.
But everyone is chasing the myth of the upgraded self. Everyone wants to skip the mess and get straight to the “better” version of themselves, the calm, evolved, boundary-honoring human who never loses their shit in traffic or texts their ex at 2 a.m.
But that version? It doesn’t exist.
There is no polished “higher self” waiting for you at the finish line. There’s just you, the masterpiece and the mess, the love and the fear, the light and the shadow, all jumbled together, all demanding to be met.
That’s the joke nobody tells you.
You think you’re healing so you can get rid of the ugly parts. But real healing isn’t exile. It’s integration.
It’s all about engagement with the mirror you can’t avoid . You don’t find your deeper self on a meditation cushion. You find it in the mirror of other people.
Your triggers? Your patterns? The way you shut down when someone loves you too well? The way you chase the kind of love that hurts? That’s your curriculum. That’s where the real lesson is hiding.
It’s easy to sit alone and think you’re enlightened. It’s harder to sit across from someone who knows exactly how to push your buttons and not revert back to the kid who never felt good enough.
Other people show you the parts of yourself you’ve been trying to outrun. Which is why you keep blaming them for your pain. And why you keep choosing people who will never truly meet you.
Integration is the quiet moment when you finally stop performing. When you can feel the ache without numbing it. When you can sit with your fear, your shame, your wanting, and not make it someone else’s job to fix it. When you stop outsourcing your worth to someone else’s approval, attention, or apology. That’s when life stops feeling like a performance and starts feeling like yours.
Not clean. Not fucking perfect. But raw , real.
This is when you discover the beauty of no longer abandoning yourself
You don’t wake up one day and “arrive.” There’s no trumpet fanfare, no graduation ceremony where someone hands you your enlightened badge and a glass of kombucha. You just stop abandoning yourself. Moment by moment. Choice by choice.
And in that quiet, steady place , where you’re no longer at war with who you are, you find what you’ve been looking for all along.
Not peace. Not perfection. Just you.
~ Zen Prem
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