finding your path
Roadmap
Dear Michael,
I’m writing this letter to serve as a roadmap in your search for the things you want to do, to become, or to experience in life.
As you grow up, you’ll read books and hear people talk about your path in life. They’ll offer advice on how to set goals, prioritize, plan, and execute. They’ll talk about building skill sets and guiding values, all great things I might add — to learn and embrace.
What I want you to know, however, is that while most people focus on the prize, the path we take holds more importance than its destination. Not all paths will lead us to our goals, and so we have to be careful in choosing the right one to walk.
I want you to know what nobody told me before: the reason many people don’t get what they want from life isn’t that they’re incapable of achievement, but that they don’t realize they’re walking in the wrong direction.
Failing to understand that we must step off our initial life path to experience our destiny cost me many years. I hope you avoid falling into the pitfalls that slowed me down. While they taught me important life lessons, they were unnecessary delays, and I’d be happy for you to avoid them.
Walking a path that leads away from our goals isn’t a display of ignorance; it’s a testament to a lack of awareness of the inner workings of our human nature. If we knew we were sabotaging our goals, we’d likely take a different approach. But life isn’t always obvious. When we aren’t moving toward our goals, we’re likely to assume we’re doing something wrong.
When we’re young, we’re especially susceptible to falling prey to errors in estimation. We either underestimate ourselves, feeling like we’re incapable; or we overestimate our abilities, thinking the road we’re on is easy, never realizing we’re headed in the wrong direction. It takes time to realize there are many roads in life, and that it’s our responsibility to choose the right one.
While sometimes we’re more apt to look inward when we don’t see the results we want, other times we’re eager to assign blame. We might criticize a person, a group of people, or an institution, but this is getting caught up in the same problem of looking for errors in everyone and everything, except for the path we’re walking.
If this sounds familiar, and you’re not moving toward your goals, you’re feeling down about yourself, or begin blaming others for your lack of progress, then consider the real problem might be that you’re walking down the wrong path.
As you mature, you’ll lose interest in some things you love, but many things you’re doing now will turn into lifelong pursuits. What you need to know, however, is that finding the right path for these things is difficult.
Looking back, I see I spent most of my life looking for the starting point of my true path. This wasn’t ideal, and let’s just say I took the long way and that the scenery wasn’t worth it. In finding the right path, there are several challenges you should expect. Some of them take time to recognize, but they’re all milestones. The first thing to consider is how nature and nurture prolong the struggle to find your authentic path.
Nature and Nurture
When people speak of nature and nurture, they’re referencing two parts of you. Nature is the part you were born with. This includes several things, from your natural disposition to the behavioral trends likely to emerge from your DNA. You inherited these traits from your parents and ancestors, along with a few anomalies specific to you.
Nurture refers to the outside influences that shape your worldview after you’re born. Some examples include our familial, cultural, and religious beliefs. Together, nature and nurture heavily influence the decisions you make and actions you take.
The Inherited Identity
In nature, there are many examples of animals capable of survival within days of their birth. The human being is not one of them. As infants, we’re completely dependent on our parents. This reliance helps to create a connection that feels inseparable. Nature brought us into this world incapable of surviving on our own, and we learned to cling to those who fed and cared for us.
Those who raise you will teach you what they think you need to know, and thus set you upon what I call the path of your inherited identity. This path leads toward a persona others want for you, but that you didn’t knowingly choose for yourself. As children, we don’t recognize it as a path because it’s the only thing we know. Through our parent’s guidance, we come to love what our parents love, and we become suspicious of what they tell us is suspicious. Their fears become our fears, as do their faults.
When we’re born, we don’t understand that we’re independent from others. In the truest sense of the word, we have no sense of self. It takes a couple of years of brain development before a toddler understands they’re separate from the world, and that other people also have their own sense of self. The awareness of our individuality, it seems, needs time to seed and grow. I don’t think most parents intentionally place their children on a path that stifles their individuality, but it’s also no secret that a parent’s beliefs about what children need are often based on the parent’s past experiences, independent of a child’s current needs.
Dissonance
As we mature, we develop unique expectations of life and feel our inherited identity may not be our own. But when we’re young, stepping off the known path and venturing out to something unfamiliar feels scary. The discomfort of feeling like we don’t belong in our own skin is something we label as awkwardness, something we blame on ourselves rather than our path.
I was a new teenager when these feelings first arrived, but I dismissed them as a lack of personal understanding. With time, stepping off my inherited path became an unserious proposition I toyed with in my imagination. But even at this young age, I recognized the value of the tangible. Ideas of who I wanted to become or what I wanted to do seemed like dreams made of vapor, and even though my inherited identity felt awkward, I found comfort in its familiarity. The safety of the tangible made stepping into the unknown feel like an unwise proposition.
But in this rationale, I found my imagination suffered, and I could neither forget my desire to flee nor the fear that kept me stuck. I quieted my desire for individuality, reasoning it was a childish impulse, deciding the dissonance I felt was a protective mechanism that was trying to keep me safe. And so for several more years, I stayed affixed to a path that was not my own.
What I didn’t know then, and I want you to know now, is that the feeling I assumed was a protective measure was really a response to fear. Both nature and nurture trained me to be wary of letting go of what was already in my possession. Deep inside my ancient brain, letting go of my inherited identity felt dangerous. If I combined this instinctual fear with the influence our parents exerted to stay on their path, then it was easy to see why some people never tried to find their authentic self.
Nature had another trick up its sleeve. While leaving what I knew felt dangerous, a counter-instinct drove me toward exploration. This evolved intuition had allowed humans to adapt and thrive in changing environments since our origin. And so I had a dichotomy planted deep within — to both cling to what was familiar and to be driven away from it.
This is the root of the dissonance we all feel, an unease that pulls us in two opposing directions simultaneously because we can’t see what nature sees: that the individual is only an instrument necessary to preserve the whole. But while the individual’s wants may be unimportant, they are mostly uninhibited. Nature prescribes our birth and death, but that space in between. That faint and beautiful spark — it is ours.
Chasing Rabbits
As a young child, the thought of venturing out on my own seemed daunting. Leaving my inherited identity was something I tried to negotiate fiercely. I did this because I believed I could step one foot onto a new path while keeping the other foot on the old. This attempt to straddle two paths seemed like a good way to take smaller chances on something new while leaving a safety rope to my past.
When we were younger, Mom and Dad used to take the family to eat at a small Chinese restaurant in town. The food there was amazing. I still remember their Mongolian beef and garlic chicken dishes. While the meals were great, some of my favorite moments came with the fortune cookies that arrived at the table with the check. The crunchy vanilla goodness of those folded cookies still takes me back to our childhood. I used to keep the fortunes I liked, placing them inside my otherwise empty wallet. On one occasion, I received a fortune that stayed with me for years. It read, “He who chases two rabbits catches neither.”
Trying to walk two paths simultaneously was me chasing two rabbits. I didn’t get very far along my journey as the path to conformity and the path to self-reliance quickly diverged. When I thought about why I was trying to negotiate this impossible task, a familiar theme was present. Leaving what we know for something we don’t is scary.
This time in my life reminds me of a narrow-beamed flashlight illuminating a roadway. My wife and I are runners, and because of our work schedules, some of our runs happen so early that we often return to the house well before the sun rises. To run in the dark, we use headlamps. And while the lamps are bright, their beams are narrow, lighting only slivers of the dark expanse around us. Living in the country, it can feel daunting to be on the dark roads. Every so often, I’ll turn my head from side to side, looking all around and behind us, searching for any glowing eyes watching us, signaling deer, opossums, or coyotes.
Looking back at this early part of my journey, I realize the upbringing we received from our parents, family, school, and church fashioned our view of the world. And although this view seemed clear and bright, it was a narrow beam that only showed a thin slice of reality. Growing up, we were always worried about what we couldn’t see.
These fears weren’t just a part of our imagination. The people who controlled our inherited identity carefully fashioned them. For us, these influences were the church and our parents, and neither hesitated to paint a bleak picture of what the darkness held. Throughout our childhood, they made it clear that the unknown held insufferable danger. The path we inherited wasn’t just the one everyone wanted for us; they taught us it was the only path that allowed survival in this life and the next.
It can take years to develop the confidence to leave the light and walk out into the dark. I know several people who never strayed from their inherited path. Maybe they were content to walk along the thin light, but I suspect they never strayed for fear of what was out there. Now that I have more distance from that time, I see the only monsters the darkness held were the ones that lived in our beliefs. I don’t fault anyone for embedding that fear in us. Their control, they believed, was in our best interest. But between you and me, please know that any kind of manipulation, even if well-intentioned, is cruel. It undermines any sense of honesty in a relationship and does nothing to advance a child toward truth.
The lesson about chasing two rabbits stayed with me, and it helped me to realize the futility of trying to walk in two different directions simultaneously. I couldn’t be both myself and who others wanted me to be without violating someone’s expectations. Today, I see the fortune cookie for what it was: a longing for serendipity, a hope that something would give me permission to break the rules others dictated. Without the confidence to fully be oneself, and without the honest support of others, I felt powerless to step onto an alternative path. Taking that first step forward, however, required me to face a new challenge regarding the life and death of my inherited identity.
The Quest
Stepping off my inherited path began a type of quest, a search for my authentic self. What I didn’t know then was that this was the start of another long process. If I’d been walking a path others chose, and I wanted to walk in my own direction, there was first a grueling middle ground to traverse.
My quest brought many challenges, and there were times their difficulty made me want to quit my journey. Life doesn’t come with an owner’s manual, so I had to learn how to cross this middle ground through a painful process of trial and error. Like a person trying to find their way through a large maze, I took several wrong turns, made repeated mistakes, and needed more experience before crossing into unfamiliar territory.
If someone had told me about what I’d encounter and how I should navigate those experiences, I would’ve saved myself a lot of time and heartache.
Resistance
Before I talk about crossing this middle ground, I want to warn you about how your quest will affect your relationships with others. Right now, you receive a lot of support from family and friends, and you get along with pretty much everyone. But stepping off your inherited path changes how some people feel about you, and I don’t want you to be blindsided. Prepare to see a side of people they’ve never shown.
Just as your inherited identity means something to you, it can become an important part of another person’s identity. And even though you are your own person, free to change your life, some people take it personally when they feel you are making changes that affect theirs. Please know that while they have a right to feel how they want, they have no right to influence you for their own benefit.
A few people might try to talk you into staying on your inherited path. Some will criticize you and may even try to prevent you from leaving. Never feel the need to justify your decisions, explain your actions, or apologize for exercising your freedom. Give these people a brief time to come around, but be ready to place solid boundaries between you.
Others will be worried that the decisions you’re making are wrong. With time, people will come around, and you’ll find support from most of your family and friends. Some will be ready to cheer you on from the beginning, and others will need to see you make progress along your path before they’re comfortable offering support.
As you navigate your way to find your authentic self, remember some people who know you may have undertaken the same journey and failed. Maybe they secretly feel they settled for a life they didn’t want, and these people might feel threatened by your attempt to leave what they couldn’t. It might sound sad, but some people will feel better seeing you fail.
Don’t worry if there’s no one there to support you. You’re on a personal journey that you have to walk alone, anyway. It’s best to get used to it sooner than later. Once you find your authentic path in life and your sense of individuality grows, there will be time enough to reconnect with those from your past. But I’ll be honest with you: there will be very few past relationships that endure throughout your lifetime.
The further you move from your past, the less you’ll have in common with those who were a part of that era. Don’t get down about this, though, because you’ll build many new friendships along the way.
A Vicious Cycle
It was several years before I worked up the courage to step off our inherited path. On the day I made this decision, I felt triumphant. It finally felt like I was taking my first steps along a path I had been seeking for years. I learned, however, that the distance between the inherited path of our childhood and the one that called me was an unexpected journey of its own. I call this middle ground the path of the fractured identity, and it would take me twenty years to cross this divide.
When I stepped off my old path, I stepped away from everything I knew. As I went through life, daily experiences tested me. With time, I realized that most of what I had learned as a child had little to do with the way the world worked. My expectations and the decisions I made were consistently at odds with the results I experienced. Day by day, decision by decision, I found that most every choice I made produced a result I didn’t expect, or want. This made life off my inherited path feel unpredictable and dangerous. Walking alone in the dark without a light, I suddenly felt afraid of getting lost.
While a few things in life moved along okay, most things were completely off. It was as if I was taking a test and had accidentally skipped one question, throwing off my entire answer sheet. Every time I made a confident decision, life returned a missed answer. This quickly eroded my confidence, and as I reassessed my situation, the ground beneath me grew shaky, feeling like at any moment it could open up and swallow me.
My trust in those who taught us as children waned. I suspected they knew their beliefs didn’t align with reality. Did they do this to me on purpose? Was this another form of control that guaranteed punishment for leaving their group? It was an icy feeling losing trust on both paths, old and new. It felt like leaving my inherited path had been a complete mistake.
Within a year, I was back on my old path and gave up all hope of reaching my dreams. Those around me celebrated my return. Before, leaving had felt risky, and now I had first-hand knowledge of what happened when one ventured out into the unknown.
My stubbornness, however, got the best of me, and soon, stepping off the inherited path, trying to move forward, falling flat on my face, and returning to my past became a vicious cycle. Each time I stepped into the dark, I vowed to complete my journey, and each time I found myself back where I started. These deeply ingrained experiences and the pain they brought would take years to unlearn.
With each failure, my desire to venture out grew weaker. And each time I tried again, it took more courage than the time before. Back then, I figured this was the hard work I had to put in when pursuing my goals. Now, I understand this was a senseless fight against myself. My old beliefs were holding me back, and my unwillingness to let them go was wreaking havoc on my life.
Looking back, I realize that each time I tried to leave my inherited path; I held on to beliefs that were incongruent with the way the world operated. And instead of changing my old worldview, I clung to it more tightly. Giving up my prior beliefs felt like I was harming an old friend. My inherited identity was a persona with a life of its own. Call it immaturity, but I couldn’t just let my old self shrivel and die.
Till Death Do Us Part
Staying on my old path was preventing my rebirth, and with time I came to realize the death of my old self was the only way to leave my inherited path. My clinging to old beliefs and trying to move toward my goals was like throwing an anchor overboard and then trying to paddle away. But taking the plunge, giving myself fully, allowing the old me to die so that I could move closer to my destiny wasn’t without consequence.
My inherited identity’s death was only figurative, but we perceive this type of loss as real. The experience of giving up one’s identity can trigger deep emotions, which can be debilitating. We perceive our identity as a solid entity that wishes to continue living, just like the physical life underlying it. At this crossroads of my journey, I had to decide between my old identity and my dream of finding my authentic self. One could remain, but the other had to be laid to rest.
Nobody enjoys loss, but death is a type of loss without equal. There comes a time in everyone’s life when somebody or something we know dies. If this is a distant relative or a person you don’t know well, then we might witness others grieve without feeling the same depth of pain. But when somebody we love dies, the experience is overwhelming and inexpressible. And if it sounds odd that a figurative loss could also cause this type of pain, think back to the ending of a relationship with someone you didn’t want to lose. That relationship was also a figurative entity whose life or loss caused genuine joy or sorrow.
The figurative loss we experience brings a spectrum of negativity. Afflictive emotions like anger or depression can affect us, coloring our worldview. We might fall into a profound state of sadness or feel rage that has the power to interrupt our journey and change who we are. Some people get stuck in these dark places for years or even decades. Don’t judge them or yourself. Grief is a deep hole, and the only way out is to accept the loss.
Acceptance means letting go of negative emotions and embracing reality without further resistance. Acceptance is not giving in; it’s not saying that the loss was okay. It’s only acknowledging the event happened, and that it was something out of our control. Acceptance occurs when we no longer have to fight against this truth.
When you experience a loss, don’t let negative emotions surprise you. They have the potential to delay or even end your journey. While accepting a loss isn’t a matter of flipping an emotional switch, it’s best to work toward acceptance as soon as possible. Do not delay.
Choosing which identity to let go of was a matter of how I wanted to live my life. When I came to this decision, I imagined myself as an old man reflecting on my journey at the end of my life. I decided that if I didn’t pursue my authentic path, I’d regret it. As for you, I’m confident you’ll find your own way in life. Remember, you’re accountable to yourself, and no one else.
The loss of your old self will be difficult, and you shouldn’t underestimate the gravity of the emotional pain you’ll experience. It’s hard to lose your identity, especially when you feel responsible for its collapse. Remember this is just an illusion, and while you’ll be giving up everything you know about yourself, what’s really dying is the persona of what others wanted you to be. If you can grasp this, then you’ll not delay in setting your inherited identity down and moving forward along your way.
While a perceived sense of loss is natural, try not to get caught up in long-term negativity. Feel your feelings and get moving. Accept the situation as it is, let go of any need to keep the old you alive, and don’t be angry or depressed about anything. You’re almost at the starting point of your true path. There’s just one more obstacle to pass.
Fractured
As I moved forward and began rebuilding who I was, I ran into another challenge. While giving up the old me felt overwhelming, I learned several things about life, and getting some solid ground under my feet felt invigorating. Then something unexpected happened.
I rediscovered pieces of my old self that had survived its figurative death. Killing off my old identity, I found out, had been a test. With time, I realized the only thing I let go of was my belief that my old self was a solid entity. It turns out that my inherited identity was really a conglomeration of many parts of me. The decision to let go of it didn’t result in its demise but was an act of fracturing that role into its component parts.
This discovery brought the realization that I could move toward my authentic path, carrying certain parts of me forward while leaving other parts behind. The parts of me I was afraid of giving up were things I could keep. These were the lessons I learned during my upbringing that withstood the test of time. And the parts of my past that were painful were unnecessary baggage I could set down. I no longer needed to carry them.
This realization should’ve been a source of relief, something that gave me confidence in my search for my authentic self. Unfortunately, every light casts shadows, and with identity fragmentation, an unexpected thing occurred. Despite the opportunity to keep the useful experiences and set down the bad, the fragmenting shed light on a painful fact. If I really wanted to accept that I was free to leave my pain in the past, then I had to first admit a part of this pain had always been under my control.
To be clear, I knew the bad things I experienced as a child weren’t my fault, and any incidents that occurred outside of my control weren’t mine to own. This was a fact beyond dispute. At some point, we all get hit with an occasional arrow that injures us and causes pain. These arrows might have hit me accidentally, or maybe someone intentionally inflicted my wounds. Whoever shoots the bow is responsible for the arrow, not the person who gets hit. What I had to learn, however, was that how I reacted to being hit by an arrow was completely mine to own. While I wasn’t responsible for the actions of others, I was accountable for my response.
In Buddhist philosophy, there’s a concept called the Second Arrow. This second arrow symbolizes what we do with our wounds and recognizes our reaction can cause additional harm that’s inflicted with our own hands. Harmful second arrow responses might include behaviors like feeling sorry for ourselves, losing confidence, feeling angry at ourselves or others, or feeling a need to overcompensate, hoping to regain control over our safety. These secondary wounds can fester and last for years or even a lifetime. This realization meant that much of the pain in my life that I perceived as inherited was actually under my control. This was a hard truth to swallow.
The challenge of fragmentation was accepting responsibility for all the second arrows in my life and then dealing with my response to this realization. This wasn’t easy because it required me to navigate natural reactions like guilt, shame, feeling stupid, or being angry at myself. This was all paradoxical because accepting that I could set down the bad and carry forward the good should’ve been great news. It should’ve felt liberating and propelled me forward toward my authentic path. Instead, I had to learn to accept responsibility and forgive myself before I could let the baggage go.
Those who can’t accept that some of the pain they experience is under their direction might end their journey here, either returning to their inherited path or tumbling through the rest of their life in emotional limbo. Others will accept what happened, but carry guilt, shame, or anger into their future. These are not emotions you want to weave into your new path.
My advice is to move quickly and acknowledge your complicity in whatever pain was under your control. Stop the bleeding, forgive yourself for the inconvenience, let go of any guilt, shame, or anger, and be on your way. The beginning of the authentic self is just a step away.
The Start Of A New Path
In this letter, I’ve outlined the hard path you must travel to discover your authentic self. I’ve tried to provide a map to prevent surprises and help you get through any potential jams. While difficult, the results are worth the effort. Never doubt this.
One day you’ll look back on your journey and laugh at how hard it was to take a trip that, in the end, was inevitable. Just keep moving forward and try not to get stuck in any mental quicksand that would delay your arrival at your next starting point. Life is an adventure, and every win is glorious, and every setback is an opportunity for growth and wisdom. Each difficulty along the way will provide a future perspective that can usher in a new level of gratitude and satisfaction in life.
Michael, I’m proud of you, and I hope you’re proud of yourself, too. You made it through childhood and life as a young adult. You confronted your dissatisfaction with the life you inherited. It might have taken several tries, but you finally made the jump to search for your own path in life. After failed attempts to walk both paths simultaneously, you faced the tough decision of deciding between the death of your former self or the death of your dream. You valiantly chose your dream over the notion of a life unexplored.
You grieved the loss of your identity and moved to accept it. When you discovered your inherited identity was not gone, but merely fractured, you accepted some parts of you were worth taking forward along your journey, while relaxing your grip on past pains, bravely letting them go. You accepted responsibility for driving some of your own pain and negativity, and you let go of anger, guilt, and shame. You picked up the positive pieces of yourself and let go of everything else.
Now, my young friend, your life begins. You begin.