You hear it often from college alumi and anxious parents and former teachers all the time. During your college years, they all tell you that you can expect to find yourself.

The college atmosphere fosters such an independent environment, one that maintains the optimum temperature for self-realization.

You are independent of your parents. You are far beyond the reach of their beliefs and ideas that once had such a suffocating hold on you.

Nothing about pre-college life really prepares you for college life though. After years of having countless lessons instilled in you, being taught how to think and how to live in line with your parents beliefs, you are suddenly dumped in an environment where you are expected to be your own person.

And it is at that moment that you realize that you have never practiced, much less ever perfected, this art.

This realization is typically followed by some intense soul-searching and some life-changing modifications – a journey commonly referred to as self-discovery.

It is a journey that so many of us embark on. But if we are fully honest with ourselves, many of us do not pursue it with enough passion or patience – either because we know what a difficult journey it can be or because we are too fearful of the power and the truth that we will find.

There are others of us who have dedicated our entire lives to this journey of self-discovery. And one common question arises. Why should one feel that she must find herself?

One’s self seems like the one thing that one should never lose, much less need to search for. That is, until one has lived.

You start to realize that “you” are composed of a myriad of layers.

From the person you are around your friends, the person you are because your parents told you to be, to the person you dare not become because it contradicts your religion.

By this point, you have to deconstruct all of these layers in order to get to the real you.

So, the real you becomes more like some mysterious G-spot that you so desperately search for because you are certain that upon its discovery you are guaranteed to experience some unparalleled, euphoric satisfaction.

Commonly though, this desperation is coupled with an indescribable fear.

A fear of disappointment. A fear of reality.

Fear is what holds so many of us back in our quest to find our organic selves.

We fear the risk of throwing off our comfortable, Snuggie-like fleece of our familiarity to journey into the dark abyss of the unknown.

But honestly, there is nothing greater for us to fear than to live our lives as ‘someone else’s self’ because we were too afraid to define ourselves … by ourselves.

Author