One of my least favorite phrases as a child was one of the most common: “Be yourself.”

My reaction was something along the lines of, Yeah, that’s a great idea. If you just want to go ahead and tell me who that is, I’ll do it. At no point throughout my life have I felt even the illusion that I understand myself.

The world expects you to be able to articulate who you are, so to a certain degree we all pretend we’ve got ourselves figured out. But at a certain point several months ago, I became a little disillusioned with the pretending and went into an unprompted panic about myself. Was I living the right life? Was I blind to something inside? Who was I? We ask these questions all the time, but it felt like a crisis.

There are lots of activities associated with “finding yourself” and I’ve tried a lot of them. Meditating. Journaling. Researching. Delving into unexplored layers of my spirituality. Making lifestyle changes. Being more honest and real. Spending time alone in nature. Taking risks. Escaping to other cities and countries, even solo. For the record, everything I just listed was inexpressibly transformative and important. I learned lessons that I could never simply list in an Odyssey article and I became something new.

But I never found myself.

Despite several profound realizations and lots of magical, even unexplainable, experiences along my journey, I never reached some crazy ultimate epiphany moment in which I discovered who I was. If I reached any epiphany, it was that I probably never would.

I didn’t need to find myself. What I needed was to find peace and wonder in uncertainty. Sure, we’ll keep learning about new parts of our identities and inner selves. But the self is not something you “find.” This was half the beauty of my experiences in this journey: I was being created, nourished, developed. Yes, I was learning to access layers of myself and my connection to others and the world. But the “self” is not some elusive “thing.” It’s dynamic, thrilling, shifting. To accept this is to have agency, to avoid becoming prisoners of who we think we are, because who we are is different from who we can be or will become.

I will never know who I am. And thank goodness for that.