Many times you can feel a disconnection from the people around you. You feel as if you just don’t ‘get’ what everyone is excited about. You don’t relate to many people, even if they are the same age. You see yourself as older than you really are, more mature than your years may suggest. Maybe you tend to get lost in your thoughts for far too long, leading to a day of sitting at your desk with an empty word document staring back at you for hours on end. Maybe your thoughts just tend to flow better when using pen and paper instead. Maybe you put sentimental meaning behind nearly everything in your life, too. If you agree with any of these statements, you may well be an Old Soul, just like me. Here are 5 ways to self-diagnose yourself as someone who was born at the wrong point in time.

1. You Take Everything To Heart

This doesn’t mean that you are overly sensitive. It just means that you can find meaning in almost everything in your life. From the shirt you decide to wear that day, to the exchange you have with the Barista at the coffee shop, to your favorite song playing when you need it most - even though you have your Spotify account set to ‘shuffle’. We Old Souls tend to find sentiment everywhere we look. We think of everyday encounters and conversations in the most poetic and ‘romantic’ ways. We can describe and experience someone else’s “normal” in a way that could only be written about in a novel. Old Souls tend to think of everything in their life as a collective moment building to some greater final meaning or purpose. This is why we tend to have trouble thinking too far ahead, resulting in a ‘day-by-day’ attitude.

2. You Overthink EVERYTHING

A great transition from my previous point, we Old Souls tend to overthink and over-analyze everything in life. Just as mentioned before, we may think that every moment in our lives will all lead to some greater purpose in the end. But a lot of times a cup of coffee is just a cup of coffee, you know? I can admit to this first hand. Many times I realize what I thought to be ‘existential building blocks’ in my life were really just everyday encounters. Not always, don’t get me wrong. But sometimes us Old Souls need to give our brains a chill pill.

3. You Prefer Good Old Fashioned Communication

I hate texting. Not the ‘I need to get in touch with you right away’ texting, but the moments when you are trying to have a real conversation with someone. The moments when you need to feel the human emotion on the other side of the dialogue. The moments when all of the subtleties of human communication matter so much more than an emoji or GIF. The moments when genuine thoughts and feelings must be expressed in order to relieve the anxiety and worry that weighs on the mind of every Old Soul. Phone calls, handwritten letters, getting a cup of coffee with someone in person and just over FaceTime. Being able to understand and connect on a deep and meaningful level with another person can only truly be appreciated the old fashioned way.

4. You Get Lost In Your Thoughts

If you’re like me, you tend to daydream a bit too much. You find yourself replaying the same scenarios in your head - past or future - over and over and over, exhausting yourself physically and emotionally. You tend to see yourself as if you were being followed by a camera crew recording every minute of your life, just waiting for these crucial moments or conversations to happen. All to be revisited late at night when you are alone with your thoughts instead of getting some much-needed sleep. This kind of ties into my point about overthinking everything, too.

5. You Live By The Mantra That Everything Happens For A Reason.

I have believed in this for many years, and this kind of loops into everything I’ve written here. Whether it’s overthinking a ‘normal’ event in your day-to-day life or thinking for far too long on something that has already happened; a true Old Soul holds a genuine romantic view of the world. Whether it’s forgetting to grab your car keys in the morning and having to run back in the house causing your morning commute to be thrown off by approximately 30 seconds, or not getting to attend the college of your dreams. An Old Soul holds firm the belief that everything in life happened for a reason, even if it’s not in their life directly. It can be exhausting, disheartening, and may make us sound like we’re just dreamers who have lost touch with reality. But above all else, this worldview and life motto leaves one thing to remaining: A seemingly unbreakable sense of hope.