Rediscovering Yourself

By Tatiana Goded

Rediscovering yourself is one, if not THE, reason we are here: to find ourselves after feeling lost for a while.

In a world where success and money rule, finding what truly moves you has become an extremely difficult task. And lonely. Even if you have many people to help you, only you can take the driver’s seat, only you know the way. Most importantly, only you are able to start the process. The outside world might distract you, tempt you with routes that look too attractive not to try, the ones that can take you to easy successes, and the promise of happiness. But, when a few years down the track you feel empty inside, it’s time to re-evaluate your life, check your priorities and look deep inside for what defines you as a unique person, what is your gift, the thing you could do for hours on end, forgetting about everything else.

This usually happens in your midlife, the famous midlife crisis. It happened to me, with many aspects of my life. One of them is my passion for writing. I have loved writing since I was a girl. I loved inventing stories, imagining plots and characters. But, as with many others, the general schooling system focused on the rational mind and achieving goals, making me leave aside my passion to become an A+ student. I forgot about writing and focused on my studies, all the way to having a PhD in Physics. When I finished, I felt empty inside, as if I had been sucked up by the system, torn between my success and my feeling of needing more. The day after I finished my PhD scholarship, I enrolled on my first online creative writing course. I loved every bit of it, and I suddenly felt alive as I hadn’t in a long time. However, I didn’t know how to live with my passion, how to include it in a materialistic life were achieving and collecting seemed to be all there was. There was no space for my creativity, and I stopped writing.

A few more years passed by and my need persisted. I took two more courses and I started a pattern: I would write during the course, enjoy my time away creating, and then I would stop when the course finished. I needed a fourth course to make a promise to myself: I would not stop writing anymore, no matter what, no excuses. The novella in my last course became a novel. It took me four years to write it. I did it in stolen time: most of it was written in the middle of the night, during a period where I couldn’t sleep much. This novel, A Trip Towards the Sunset is a dream come true, and it has brought me immense joy. Above all, it’s a story of success of the most important calibre: success on my own path of self-discovery, on my search for my long-forgotten dream, those that only you know about.

Rediscovering yourself is hard. It’s going against the mainstream. It’s cancelling the noise of the outside world telling you what career to choose, where to live, who you should be. It’s turning down the light of who you think you are, and brightening the light of who you know deep inside you are. Rediscovering yourself is the greatest of successes, because it stands up upon the greatest of all failures: the failure to yourself.

There are many other paths I will need to take to be the person I’ve always dreamed of being. Some I have started now – I am in the process of opening a business in life coaching. It’s not the first time, but this time I am not allowing anyone (the outside world, or more importantly, myself) to cut my wings. Some other paths will take longer, but this time I am determined to succeed. One thing experience brings, is the big picture of knowing the consequences of not following the path of your heart. The feeling of emptiness is all too present in this world. We need more joy, more fulfilment. The only thing we need to start is a seed strong enough to survive, one watered regularly, one taken care of and having close to your heart no matter what is going on outside. Bringing joy to ourselves is the start of the process to bring more joy to the World. Joy radiates like the sun. There is nothing that brings more joy than seeing someone smile, someone sharing their passion. The best healers and therapists are the ones that are living their purpose by sharing their passion with others. Those are the most wanted, because joy and passion are contagious.

Let’s spread less regrets, hatred and jealousies, and more joy and passion. Let’s start going within and asking ourselves what truly moves us, and when we have found it, let’s grab on to it with all our strength, our courage and determination, and never let it go.

Tatiana Goded (https://tatianagoded.com/) is a writer based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington. Her first novel, A Trip Towards the Sunset is published by The Copy Press (https://www.copypress.co.nz/shop/). Tatiana is also a life coach specialized on recovering long-forgotten dreams (https://puiakiprecious.com/).