Finding Yourself

I've often heard of people who are trying to find themselves and always wondered what a person means by that. How do you find yourself? I think it's often used as an excuse for someone to extricate themselves from a difficult situation, most often troubled relationships. I imagine some find it as a deeper way of saying, "I'm not happy with you and I want out to find someone that does make me happy." Although I'm a firm believer that you can't depend on someone else to make you happy, but that's another rambling.

So as I'm reading from my most recent fiction selection I come across the term "find yourself" once again. I then realize that I think I get what a person trying to find oneself is looking for and at the same time I realize that it can't be found. It is something that comes with age, wisdom and experience. The experiences are not always good but they certainly help shape who you become. When I think back to my youth, especially my twenties, I can certainly put my finger on the floundering that likely creates this need for one to find oneself. I see it as a need to figure out what you believe and the need to understand why you believe it. It's a desire to feel content with who you've been and who you've become. It's a need to be at peace with the events of your life, to be sure that they happened for a reason or maybe to be able to pin-point the good that came from the especially tragic events of life.

So then I wonder what will I tell my daughters someday if they express the need to find themselves? I think I will have to tell them exactly what I've expressed here. You can't find yourself, simply live life, accept and embrace the good and bad of it and one day you'll wake up to realize that yourself has found you.