how to find yourself if you never had a self to begin with

on pleasing less, feeling more, and rediscovering you

finding yourself will first feel like losing yourself. after you finally make the conscious decision to stop shaping yourself to fit everyone else. after you’ve finally put down the mirror you’ve been holding onto for so long. you come to realise, the self you’ve been performing has become muscle memory.

every choice, every smile, every accommodation you made was a brick in someone else’s palace. and now the walls remain, but the floor is gone. you fall into yourself, uncertain of what you will find.

throughout life you are always discovering yourself, always meeting yourself, but without a baseline, without a sense of safety, the first steps feel like a free fall.

when you try to inhabit yourself, part of you pulls back. it’s the part that’s been trained to live in other people’s worlds, the part that’s learned to morph itself into unnatural shapes so that others wouldn’t be uncomfortable, angry, or disappointed. and it recoils because it doesn’t know this new space. it’s never been allowed to occupy it fully. it’s a mixture of fear, habit, and sheer disbelief, like meeting a stranger in your own body.

and yet, this is also proof that you’re beginning to notice the space between the conditioned self and the deeper self. the recoil is marking the border of your old patterns. so this moment will feel disorientating because of its unfamiliarity.

it is the step towards recognising that the self you feel pulling away is also the self waiting to be fully seen and trusted. and for the first time you feel this disorientation of possibility.

even people with relatively untraumatised upbringings meet themselves step by step. the difference is that they start with a baseline, a foundation to build from. for myself and many others, this foundation was fractured and uneven.

so the work isn’t just discovering yourself, it’s construction and excavation. stone by stone, one reflection at a time, you start to lay your own bedrock.

and each piece feels heavy. some days lifting a single stone is exhausting. the weight of all the things you weren’t allowed to be presses down. sometimes a stone slips from your hand. and crumbles. and sometimes it will fit perfectly, and you will feel that rush of relief.

the rhythm is unpredictable. and often painfully slow. but each piece becomes part of the foundation you were never given. a ground you can finally stand on.

over time the ground begins to hold. the floor rises under your feet. the cracks don’t disappear, and they shouldn’t. they remind you of where you’ve come from. the depths of what you have survived. but the world no longer presses on you the same way. and the floor is no longer gone. the ground you’ve built is real.

when i was deep in my people-pleasing tendencies, i felt amazed and confused around those who seemed to move through the world with effortless charisma. confidence in every word and every gesture.

i didn’t feel jealous, not exactly. it felt too far away from anything i could imagine achieving, but i did feel intense curiosity. i wanted to understand what kind of life allowed someone to inhabit themselves so fully. it felt like a cruel joke when i came to realise that charisma is something that emerges when you stop performing.

all the years i had spent bending and shaping myself, none of it had built this. none of it had created that presence.

when your inner and outer self align, you radiate coherence and others respond naturally. it’s palpable. you don’t have to charm or persuade or explain.

you are magnetic not because you are useful, but because you are whole.

a sense of self arises gradually, from networks in the brain interacting with each other. the default mode network, which supports self-reflection, the salience network, which detects what matters to you, and the executive network, which coordinates planning, decision-making, and goal-directed action, all of these create a dynamic, ongoing sense of who you are.

the self is both reflection and construction. narrative, relational, and constantly changing.

for those of us who grew up with chronic childhood trauma, habitual people-pleasing, or emotional parentification, this process is complicated.

these patterns shape both the brain and the sense of self. hyper-vigilance to others needs becomes ingrained. alexithymia, difficulty identifying or articulating emotions, may emerge. the limbic system, particularly the amygdala, becomes highly sensitive to subtle social cues, while the prefrontal cortex underutilises personal goal-setting, suppressed by years of prioritising others.

the self is slower to appear when the foundation has been fractured.

fear, habit, survival, these are not your enemies. they are the grammar of your past, the traces of what you endured.

the self is not optional. it is yours to inhabit, not theirs to consume. and it will begin to show up when the hand of obligation loosens, when attention turns inward.the floor may feel far below, but every step you take, every boundary you establish, every small act of attention or creation, lays the ground you were never given.

you will meet yourself again and again, and that is worth every small victory. sometimes you look down at your hands and wonder if they belong to you or someone else, and that is okay.

being unknown to yourself is a weightless, exhilarating starting point. meeting yourself does not mean having all the answers, or liking everything you find, but it does mean letting yourself exist fully, in all your beautiful messy contradictions.

there are so many paths to self-discovery, more than i could ever list with the care and attention they deserve. instead, i will share the ones that helped me the most, in hopes that they might do the same for you, or in greater hopes, that they will be a start to the curiosity that will lead you to your own.