From Understanding Myself to Becoming Myself

The Last Six Months

In mid-December something started to unravel inside me. Looking back now, I would describe it as the beginning of my dark night of the soul.

Not because I was depressed.

Not because I was broken.

But because something inside of me had started to unravel.

The beliefs that had organised my life for decades were no longer holding.

The stories I had been telling myself about love, worthiness, validation, faith and identity were beginning to collapse.

And the adaptations that had once protected me were no longer serving me.

Religious conditioning.

Shame.

The need for approval.

The need to prove myself.

Old identities.

Old stories.

And beneath all of them sat the same old wound.

The belief that there was something wrong with me.

That somehow I wasn’t enough.

Looking back now, I can see that many of the adaptations I had built throughout my life were attempts to compensate for a problem that never actually existed.

The First Realisation

One of the first things I noticed was how much power I was still handing over to my thoughts.

Every fear.

Every doubt.

Every story.

Every prediction.

I treated them all as if they were true, despite knowing intelluctually the opposite.

But as I started paying closer attention, I was reminded of something I already knew.

My thoughts changed constantly.

Sometimes by the hour. Sometimes by the minute. The same situation could look hopeful in the morning and hopeless by the afternoon.

The situation hadn't changed. Only my thinking had.

For the first time I started observing my thoughts rather than automatically believing them. I also started seeing them as signals rather than facts.

I already knew this. But for some reason this time it landed differently.

What Was Underneath

As the noise settled, something else began to surface.

Sadness.

Not new sadness, but old sadness.

The kind that had been sitting quietly underneath everything for decades.

I found myself sitting with memories I had spent years avoiding.

Old heartbreak.

Old disappointments.

Old loneliness.

The feeling of not being fully chosen.

The feeling of not being enough.

The feelings I had spent most of my life trying to outrun.

This was a difficult period, because what I understood was needed from me was to simply sit with them and allow them to be recognised.

No fixing.

No solving.

No distracting.

Just feeling.

And whilst the sadness was there, it wasn't destroying me. In fact the opposite was happening.

Something was releasing.

Space was being made for something new.

When The Body Joined The Conversation

Then things became physical. There were moments of tears that seemed to come from nowhere.

A tightening in my throat.

A clenching in my stomach.

Emotional waves that would arrive without warning.

At first I tried to understand them.

Then eventually I stopped trying to understand them and simply allowed them.

Because the more I stopped fighting them, the more they were able to be seen and move through me.

They arrived.

They passed.

And each time they left, they seemed to take something with them.

More of that legacy pain that had remained untouched for decades.

The Pattern I Could Finally See

The next breakthrough came from recognising a pattern that had followed me for years.

That whenever I felt sadness, loss or longing, my mind would immediately attach those feelings to a person or a situation.

Someone from my past.

Someone in my present.

Someone I cared about.

Someone I missed.

But eventually I noticed something.

The feeling was arriving before the person.

That the sadness was already there inside of me - the longing was already there - and the loneliness was already there.

And all that was happening in this new moment, was my mind was finding someone new to attach these old feelings to.

And what I eventually realised was that much of the attachment was never about other people. It was about me.

It was simply old pain looking for somewhere new to land.

That insight changed a lot for me. Because it meant I could stop chasing explanations and start listening to what I was actually feeling.

The Death Of Something Old

At some point I realised I wasn't just processing emotions. I was saying goodbye to parts of myself.

The version of me that needed validation.

The version of me that believed his worth had to be earned.

The version of me that was constantly seeking approval.

The version of me that carried shame he never deserved to carry.

For a while I thought I was grieving people. What I eventually realised was that I was grieving identities.

Versions of myself that had helped me survive previously, but versions of myself now that I no longer needed.

The difference between chasing and receiving

A week ago somebody said something very simple to me.

“You deserve good things John.”

My immediate reaction surprised me. Not outwardly, but internally.

I could feel myself pulling away from the statement. Not because I disagreed with it. But because it made me uncomfortable.

And that discomfort revealed something important.

What surprised me most was that this wasn’t a new lesson.

For years I have believed that my worth was not dependent on achievement, validation or the approval of others.

After my mid-life identity crisis in 2018, much of the work I did was centred around rebuilding my relationship with myself.

Learning self-respect.

Learning self-awareness.

Learning self-worth.

And I genuinely believed I had resolved much of that.

But looking back now, I think all I had resolved was that I understood those concepts intellectually - I believed it in my mind, could explain it, teach it and see it clearly.

But there is a difference between understanding something intellectually and carrying it in your body.

Because when somebody told me I deserved good things, something inside me still hesitated.

Not because I thought I was unworthy, but because receiving has always been harder than earning.

I had spent most of my life learning how to work for things.

Earn things.

Prove things.

Fight for things.

Achieve things.

Those things made sense to me and they were very familiar. But receiving was different.

Receiving required acceptance.

The acceptance that maybe I didn’t have to earn every good thing that came into my life.

That maybe love, connection, kindness and happiness weren’t things that had to be chased.

That maybe they could simply be received.

As I sat with that idea, another penny dropped.

Perhaps this phase of my journey is not about creating new beliefs, but allowing the beliefs I already hold to move from my head into my heart, my body and my lived experience.

To stop merely believing I am enough, but start experiencing myself as enough. A very new and different challenge.

Where I Am Today

Today I still experience sadness.

I still experience uncertainty.

I still have emotional days.

But I no longer see those experiences as evidence that something is wrong with me. I see them as part of being human.

For years I thought I was building a better version of myself. And in many ways I was.

But what the last six months have taught me is that the challenge now is no longer becoming someone new.

The challenge is learning to live as the person I have already become.

Learning to trust myself.

Learning to believe myself.

Learning to receive the goodness that life places in front of me.

Because the work of building that person is largely complete.

The work now is learning to inhabit him.

The dark night was the doorway.

The destination is learning to live as the person I’ve spent years becoming.