Understanding Yourself | Discover Yourself Through Writing

The key to understanding yourself is to remember your life properly. But it is hard, quite hard to do. Memory is not at all a sure thing. What’s worse, life is even more complex. It is woefully disorganized. The way to find yourself through this maze of haze is to discover yourself through writing.

Life is Hard – Understanding Yourself

Life… it is not something one can process easily, be it even his/her own. Life can be defined as a series of accidents, good or bad. Life, sometimes can feel like a series of anticlimaxes and disappointments, misunderstood and misremembered to boot. Added lessons only dimly learned.

We slog on through lives that lack shape. Lack story.

Therefore, it is your duty to make a story out of your own life. You owe this much to yourself. You have been responsible for your own feelings, haven’t you? You damn sure are responsible for your being alive, your loves, your ambitions and your orgasms. You owe this to yourself. It would be a crime if you don’t build up your own story.

Most people are criminals, of this. And that is why they feel so detached from themselves. Because, they don’t know their own stories! 

They don’t know their own stories

Don’t let this be your legacy.

Why Write About Yourself

Thought runs much, much faster than the pen or the keyboard, so thinking is hopelessly haphazard. But not writing. When you write, you have to toe the line to some disciplines. And this can train yourself to have cohesive thoughts, instead of fragments linked together by the barest relationships — often nothing more than visual associations.

Train yourself to have cohesive thoughts

When you start writing about your own life, the first problem you will encounter is that you will not know where to start. Should I start from the beginning? Should I write about the happiest day of my life? Should I write about the hardest day of my life? Questions will swarm through your mind, and you will drown in memories. 

That isn’t nice.

How to Write about Yourself

The approach I find useful is to start with just this day, or the last day. Write the story of your day, instead of trying to think about your whole life story. At this point, somebody should pipe up, “See, your life is not as small or insignificant as you thought!” 

See, your life is not as small or insignificant as you thought!

Start with the waking up. Think, try to remember the things you have thought right after you woke up. Most of us don’t remember it — not even of the same day, let alone yesterday. But you might. Got a link to your then-time-mind? Good, now write down why exactly you did that.

Sounds boring, huh?

Actually, no. Try going through a few paragraphs and you’ll get absorbed. You’ll see. You know why? Because the story we love most is our own story — no matter how you hate it, you love it! This is why we are always thinking about our own lives, own emotions, own feelings; this is why we get selfish; this is why we live and say ‘I am alive’; this is why we are scared of dying; this is why we kill ourselves. We love that one story all too much — and we’re always trying to bend it our own way.

And unless you’ve written it down in volumes, you will probably never realize how laughably futile that is. 

We love our own stories too much

Understanding Yourself Through Own Words

The fact, the both-sad-and-happy fact is, that we can’t change our lives. Not really. For the simple reason that if you change your life, then whose life is it anymore? Not yours, you don’t live that way!

Don’t try to change your life, that is impossible by hard logic. Change yourself, rather. That’s not free of philosophical nightmares either, and is mired in deep shit too — but at least the ending of the story will be different. At least, more different than this current edition — which you probably feel like to stop writing any time.

You are unique. You actually are, no matter how you feel like you aren’t. So your story is unique too. And know that someone, somewhere wants to read your story. The whole of it. This is why people leave suicide notes and last wishes, you know. They want somebody to know their story — at least the last bits of it. But they’ve gone blind and thus they throw away the ending of the story. It could have been so much better!

It could have been so much better.

Take Heart and Write On

Do not despair. Look at yourself in the pages you create. You will be amazed to see the sheer amount of yourself in the story — how much you could feel, how much you felt, and how much potential of feeling you still have left inside you. 

Only if you let another read your story.

1. Write your story.
2. Read it.
3. Know thyself.
4. Find another reader.
5. Live happily ever after.

It doesn’t have to be hard.