Back in 2014, my car was a freezing 2002 Corolla that smelled like stale gas and despair, and my bank account sat at a solid negative twelve dollars. There was this tiny greasy diner off the highway where the heat always rattled and the coffee tasted like copper, run by an older man named Artie who never asked why I was studying under a single flickering booth light for three hours with just one black coffee. Whenever he brought the check, he'd somehow drop off a steaming bowl of potato soup with extra crackers and whisper, "Kitchen messed up the batch, hate to waste good starch." I knew damn well he was just feeding me because I looked like a ghost.

Ten years later, life finally leveled out. I bought a small house, paid off the debt, and spent weeks tracking him down after the old diner closed its doors. Turned out he was retired, living in a quiet duplex across town with failing knees and a faded Giants cap. I didn't want to show up with a check or make it weird, so I figured out his mortgage holder and quietly paid the balance off entirely through an anonymous local trust, making sure it looked like some bank error in his favor.

When I drove past his porch yesterday to drop off a heavy-duty snowblower anonymously with a note just saying 'thanks for the soup, Artie,' I saw him standing out there looking at the machine with this completely bewildered, tearful expression. It hit me right in the chest, remembering how small my world used to be and how one tiny act of quiet mercy kept me from walking off a ledge a decade ago. I keep wondering if I did the right thing by hiding my identity, or if I should've just walked up and shook his hand instead of playing ghost.

You Can Spend Years Seeking Enlightenment and Still Avoid Knowing Yourself

We cannot find our own identity if we do not have self-exploration. When we need orientation from somewhere, an immediate response is to try to find it in other people, doctrines, religions, social role models, teachers, books, etc.

Imitation comes from the question, “Who am I supposed to be?” And if you really haven’t done deep self-exploration, it becomes easier to adopt an identity that already exists.

Carl Jung describes 3 ideas about this:

Fear of our own uncertainty: Trying to find ourselves means going to a new place. There isn’t a manual that can guarantee that we are doing the right or wrong thing, but imitation can offer you the confidence to think, “If this person lives like this, maybe I can do it too.”

In Liber Novus, he says:

“Woe to those who live according to examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, then you live the life of the example, but who is to live your life, if not yourselves? Therefore, live yourselves.”

“The signposts have fallen; undefined paths lie before us.”

Collective pressure: Society provides models of what it means to be successful, good, spiritual, attractive, etc. Without psychological differentiation, we can confuse these collective models with our inner desires.

He points out in the book:

“Common laws and doctrines compel man to be solitary, so that he can escape the pressure of the unwanted community.”

“Therefore, give man dignity and let him be an individual, so that he may find his community and love it.”

“Let each person seek their own path. The path leads to mutual love in the community. People will see and feel the similarity and commonality of their paths.”

Lack of contact with the inner world: The less we know our inner desires, contradictions, fears, shadow, and unconscious impulses, the more we depend on external references to build our identity.

He says:

“The path is within us, not in the gods, nor in doctrines, nor in laws. Within us is the path, the truth, and the life.”

“You seek the path through the external, you read books and listen to opinions: what good is that supposed to do?”

“Do you not know that you yourselves are the fertile field that bears everything that serves you?”

When we are not exploring who we really are, we look for different identities outside ourselves that we can copy. It reduces uncertainty, but it can push us away from the experiences of our own lives.

This doesn’t mean that we should deprive ourselves of books. We can consume philosophy, psychology, or spirituality for years and still keep avoiding the process of knowing ourselves.

“The path is within us, not in the gods, nor in doctrines, nor in laws. Within us is the path, the truth, and the life” (Jung, 2010, p. 129).

I found a way to know myself through therapy and meditation. I have been reading a lot of books as well, but I realised that I can share some things in common with other people, and that can also help me see my own inner desires. I made this essay about The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts, in case it is helpful for someone else trying to understand their own path:

Alan Watts helped me to see anxiety in a different way

"Every time you enter a library you might say to yourself, 'The world is quiet here,' as a sort of pledge proclaiming reading to be the greater good."
The Slippery Slope, Book 10 in the series

I'm getting a gift for a runner and need a quote. I would love something with adventure, or being strong, or even powerful women. I unfortunately don't read the same books as her. She's into acotar ( Sarah j Maas), fourth wing (Rebecca Yarros) and the like. Something from the two series would be great.

Thank you for any help!!

This quote stuck with me forever! Some people in our lives are like that; they are our shelter and our storm at the same time.