When you look back at your upbringing, you start to see how much of who you are was shaped by your environment.

For the first years of your life, you’re basically a clone of your parents.

You follow them around.

You do what they tell you.

You watch how they interact with the world.

You pick up their likes and dislikes while mixing in some of your own.

Then you go to school and learn what school tells you to learn.

You make friends and start adapting to fit in.

You watch TV, movies, sports, social media, and whatever else surrounds you.

Kids today can have an iPad full of social media and trends in their hands almost as soon as they can walk, depending on the parents.

All of this is giving you information about how to navigate the world.

You’re building patterns.

Habits.

Reactions.

Tendencies.

Likes.

Dislikes.

Ways of thinking.

Ways of protecting yourself.

Ways of trying to get what you want.

And for a lot of people, what they want is pretty simple:

Fit in. Be liked. Be accepted. Be safe.

You absorb all of this before you’re even old enough to understand what’s happening.

Eventually, everyone reaches some point in their own journey where they start asking:

“Who the hell am I?”

And maybe even more importantly:

“Why am I doing all this stuff?”

Some people figure this out relatively young.

For other people, it takes decades.

But eventually you may start looking at yourself and realizing:

A lot of the things I believe, the things I do, and the way I react didn’t necessarily come from me consciously choosing them.

They were accumulated.

And now you’re carrying them around.

The Bag You’re Carrying

Imagine that your life is a long walk up a giant hill.

Every experience you have puts something into a bag you’re carrying.

Your parents put some things in there.

School puts some things in there.

Friends.

Relationships.

Successes.

Failures.

Trauma.

Embarrassment.

Culture.

Things you’ve been told about yourself.

Things you’ve decided about other people.

Things you learned to do because they kept you safe.

Things you learned because they got you attention.

Things you learned because they helped you fit in.

You keep walking.

And every time something new happens, you throw another thing into the bag.

Eventually that bag gets too heavy.

You start noticing it.

Maybe other people notice it too.

But you convince yourself you need to keep carrying it because:

“It’s my bag.”

You’ve had it your whole life.

It must all be important.

Every once in a while, you even open it up and find something inside that you absolutely hate.

A behavior.

A belief.

A reaction.

A pattern.

Something you know doesn’t serve you anymore.

And yet you put it right back in the bag and keep carrying it.

Eventually you reach that pivotal moment where you stop and ask:

“Whose fucking stuff is this?”

“And why am I still carrying it?”

That’s where things start getting interesting.

Get Curious About Yourself

This is where I think one of the biggest steps toward self-awareness begins:

Get curious about yourself.

Not judgmental.

Curious.

Start looking at all the things you’ve accumulated and asking:

What actually belongs to me?

What did I learn from somebody else?

What no longer serves me?

What do I want to keep?

What do I want to change?

What do I want to replace it with?

The hard part is not becoming judgmental about what you find.

It’s incredibly easy to look at yourself and say:

I’m fucked up.

I’m lazy.

I’m an angry person.

I’m just an anxious person.

This is how I am.

Or you can look at the pattern and ask:

“That’s interesting. Why do I do that?”

That’s a completely different starting point.

Because now you’re investigating instead of sentencing yourself.

The Story Isn’t the Same as the Solution

This is where I think people can get stuck.

You discover something from your past that influenced you.

You understand why you react a certain way.

You finally understand where a behavior came from.

That’s useful.

But then what?

Understanding where something came from isn’t necessarily the same thing as changing it.

You can spend years talking about why you are the way you are.

At some point, you have to ask:

“Okay. I understand it. Now what am I going to do about it?”

And I want to be clear here because everyone’s circumstances are different.

Some things are much harder to change than others.

Your history matters.

Your environment matters.

Your experiences matter.

You may not control what happened to you.

But starting right now, you can practice what you do with it.

You can start practicing something different.

You can start building new skills.

You can start replacing old patterns with new ones.

You can start leveling up the character.

Observe Yourself

You can’t change something you never notice.

So start observing.

Meditation can help.

Journaling can help.

Therapy can help.

Talking to someone you trust can help.

There are a lot of different ways to do this.

The specific tool isn’t the most important part.

You need some way to start seeing yourself clearly.

Start noticing the thoughts that keep showing up.

The situations that consistently trigger you.

The conversations that make you furious.

The things you repeatedly avoid.

The things you procrastinate on.

The decisions you keep making even though you know where they lead.

Then get curious.

Maybe there’s a conversation that makes you disproportionately angry.

You’ve always blamed the other person.

But now you start asking:

“Why does this particular thing get under my skin so badly?”

You think about it.

You journal about it.

You talk about it.

And maybe you eventually realize that something similar happened to you years ago.

Maybe your mind learned that this type of interaction was dangerous.

Maybe anger became a way of protecting yourself.

Maybe pushing people away became a way of preventing yourself from getting hurt.

That’s useful information.

But now comes the important question:

“How do I want to respond instead?”

Because that’s where the work begins.

Create Your Character

I found it useful for myself to literally write this stuff down.

Things I liked.

Things I disliked.

Things I had in my life.

Things I wanted in the future.

Things I thought I wanted to do.

Things I was curious about doing.

Things I thought I was doing for other people.

Things I wanted to do for myself.

Positive things in my life.

Negative things in my life.

It helped me start separating what I actually wanted from what I had simply accumulated.

And once you have a clearer vision of the person you want to become, you can start asking better questions.

How would this person act?

How do they handle conflict?

What do they do with their time?

What kind of relationships do they have?

What does their life actually look like?

Now you’ve got something to work toward.

You’re basically creating a character.

And every time you catch yourself about to make a decision without thinking, you have an opportunity to pause for a split second and ask:

“Is this what the person I’m trying to become would do?”

Maybe you change the decision.

Maybe you don’t.

But now you’re observing yourself in real time.

You’re editing.

You’re practicing.

You’re becoming.

What About Fitness?

This applies directly to fitness.

Let’s say you promised yourself you were going to work out in the morning.

The alarm goes off.

You skip it.

Instead of simply saying:

I’m lazy.

Get curious.

Why did I skip it?

Maybe the answer really is:

I was tired and bitched out because staying in bed was easier.

Fair enough.

Now you know.

Maybe there’s something deeper going on.

Maybe part of you is uncomfortable becoming the fit person because that identity feels foreign.

Maybe you don’t believe you deserve it.

Maybe you’ve spent years using food to reward yourself after a bad day.

Pizza.

Ice cream.

Fast food.

Whatever it is.

Maybe that’s become your automatic way of self-soothing.

Now you’ve got a pattern.

And maybe that pattern has been repeated so many times that it’s contributed to you becoming unhealthy and unhappy.

So what do you do?

You don’t just sit there and judge yourself.

You investigate.

What triggers it?

What am I actually looking for when I do this?

What could I do instead?

How could I set myself up for success?

Maybe you meal-prep.

Maybe you change what’s available in your house.

Maybe you develop another way to deal with a bad day.

Maybe you practice sitting with the emotion instead of immediately trying to make it disappear.

That’s the work.

The workout isn’t just the workout. It’s another opportunity to study the person doing it.

Don’t Turn the Looking Glass Into a Rain Cloud

There’s one huge warning here.

When people start looking at themselves, they can turn the entire process into a negative rain cloud.

They start finding everything they don’t like about themselves.

Then they judge themselves for it.

Then they feel worse.

Then they use that feeling as evidence that they’re broken.

Reframe it.

What if realizing you’re not quite the person you thought you’d become is actually exciting?

You don’t know what your hobbies are?

Awesome.

Now you get to try stuff.

You don’t know what kind of relationship you want?

Great.

Now you have something to investigate.

You don’t know what kind of family you want?

You get to think about it.

You don’t know what kind of life you want?

You get to experiment.

There will absolutely be some things you try and hate.

Good.

Now you know.

That’s information.

You don’t need to have the entire character build figured out on day one.

You discover yourself by living.

Try things.

Pay attention.

See what lights you up.

See what drains you.

Notice what makes you proud.

Notice what makes you miserable.

Notice what you’re naturally drawn toward.

Then adjust.

The goal isn’t to stare at yourself in a mirror asking:

“Who am I?”

as if the answer is going to magically appear as one word or one sentence.

The answer is built through observation and experience.

You Can Change the Character

Once you start doing this work, you start pulling back layers of yourself you didn’t even know existed.

And the more you uncover, the better you get at building the character you want to move through this game with.

Maybe you discover a habit you hate.

You replace it.

Maybe you discover a belief that doesn’t serve you anymore.

You challenge it.

Maybe you discover a skill you want.

You practice it.

Maybe you realize you’ve been living according to someone else’s definition of success.

You change the game you’re playing.

And here’s the really cool part:

You aren’t locked into one character build.

You can change.

You can experiment.

You can develop different skills.

You can take a different path.

You can decide that the person you were five years ago isn’t the person you want to be five years from now.

That’s not failure.

That’s growth.

You didn’t choose everything that went into the bag.

But eventually, you get a say in what you keep carrying.

And maybe some things in that bag are going to be difficult to put down.

Maybe some will take years.

Maybe some will take a lifetime of practice.

Maybe some things feel almost impossible.

That doesn’t mean you don’t try.

Because what if you could change it?

Wouldn’t you want to find out?

But You Have to Start

You can keep playing the same character if you want.

Keep making the same decisions.

Keep having the same reactions.

Keep repeating the same relationship patterns.

Keep telling yourself the same stories.

Keep carrying the same bag.

Or you can stop.

Look inside it.

And start deciding what’s actually worth carrying.

Maybe you hear something inside yourself saying:

“I’m sick of playing this character.”

Listen to it.

You don’t have to reinvent your entire life tomorrow.

You just have to notice.

Then get curious.

Observe.

Experiment.

Practice.

Make mistakes.

Adjust.

Try again.

That’s how the character changes.

Not because you wished it into existence.

Because you practiced becoming someone different.

That’s the looking glass.

It’s not about finding some perfect version of yourself hiding underneath everything.

It’s about seeing what you’ve accumulated, deciding what still belongs, and consciously building the person you want to become.

Figure out who you are.

Figure out who you want to be.

Then start practicing.

And remember:

This is supposed to be a fun process.