When you're growing up, you often hear people talking about "finding yourself."

For the longest time, I felt uncomfortable in my skin because of this. "Finding yourself." What does that even mean?

When I was in elementary school, I figured it would happen in high school. In high school, I read a small quote from this book that my sister had on the back of her bookshelf. It was a book full of quotes from Buddha. The one quote that caught my eye and changed my life said, "one does not find themselves, for the self is always changing."

I'm not going to lie, it took me a while to fully grasp and come to terms with what this meant. To realize that I am who I am in this moment and that when I looked into the mirror that it's me staring back at myself. Not some shell of a person looking for someone to occupy it. This quote made me not feel like a football stadium when there wasn't a game. Wide, open, and empty, like if I made too much sound it would echo within the whole structure of myself. This quote made me feel at home. Like I could lie on the turf and take a deep breath and look at the clouds all day then the stars when the sun would rest and the moon came out to shine on my face. The somber quiet became like a warm blanket instead of stiff and fragile.

It made me feel like I went from renting to owning my body.

I feel like, as a whole, our society seems to glorify this whole idea of finding out who you are when you move out and head to college. I think the whole "awakening" that they're thinking of is merely just the process of becoming independent.

Being independent and being yourself are fairly different things.

Becoming independent is a grueling process, full of mistakes and searching for the correct way to rent your first apartment, buy your textbooks, and what classes to take each semester. I think in this mistaken idea of "finding ourselves" is when we are more likely to lose ourselves. We leave the comfort of ourselves and walk into others, make reckless decisions, and give ourselves over to false comfort and false self.

I'm not saying that there are not things that I don't want to improve or that I don't want to grow as a person. I mean this to say that though I am not perfect, I finally realize that I am still me.

I'm not looking for myself anymore because I've realized that I've been here all along. I've lost so much valuable time with myself because I was in search of me on the outside. I was looking for a better version of me wrapped in a bow, like a house fully furnished and ready for move-in. But, that's not how a self is achieved.

The self is nurtured from birth to death, I believe. It's the house you start with and renovate throughout the years, the house you decorate with cute little nicknacks you found at flea markets. It's the house full of memories, character, and love.