You Can Begin Where You Are
There is something wonderfully seductive about the idea of getting away.
A few days somewhere beautiful, where somebody else has made the bed and thought about what you might eat and there is no washing waiting to be folded, no one asking what’s for dinner, no pile of things sitting somewhere in your peripheral vision reminding you of everything you haven’t quite got to yet. Maybe there are long walks and good food, a massage, a notebook beside the bed, and enough quiet that you can finally hear yourself think.
I understand the appeal. I love getting away too, and sometimes I think we really do need to remove ourselves from the ordinary rhythm of our lives to see them differently.
But I’ve been thinking about something else.
What if you didn’t have to go anywhere to come back to yourself?
What if clarity wasn’t waiting somewhere else, on the other side of a plane ticket or a free weekend or the moment when the children are older, work is calmer, the house is organised and you have finally managed to create enough space in your life to think about your own?
Because I wonder if we have somehow turned knowing ourselves into another thing we need to organise.
We’ll think about what we really want when work settles down. We’ll make some changes after the children finish school. We’ll take some time for ourselves when things aren’t quite so busy. We’ll work out what comes next when we finally get a break.
Except life has an extraordinary habit of continuing.
And most of us don’t lose ourselves in one dramatic moment anyway. I think it happens much more quietly than that, through years of small accommodations and responsibilities and perfectly reasonable decisions, through work and children and partners and parents and mortgages and friendships and school lunches and deadlines, through loving people and caring for them and becoming the person everyone can rely on.
We become very good at carrying things.
Sometimes so good that we forget to ask whether we still want to carry all of them.
I hear women say quite often that they have “lost themselves”, and while I understand exactly what they mean, I’m not sure I believe that we disappear.
I think we can become buried. I think the roles get louder and the responsibilities take up more space and we become accustomed to putting ourselves a little further down the list, not because anybody necessarily told us to, but because there was always something more urgent and somebody who needed us and tomorrow seemed like a perfectly reasonable time to think about ourselves.
But underneath all of that, I think you are still there.
The things that make you laugh until you can’t breathe are still telling you something. So are the things that make you angry. The people around whom you become more yourself, the places where your shoulders seem to drop, the things you will fight for and the things you have finally realised you can no longer tolerate. The dream you quietly put away because there wasn’t room for it then. The conversation you keep avoiding because you already know what you need to say.
It is all information.
Maybe knowing yourself isn’t about discovering some hidden, more enlightened version of you.
Maybe it is simply about paying attention again.
We are constantly being asked to become
There is an enormous industry invested in telling us who we could be if only we tried a little harder.
Healthier, calmer, more productive, more successful, more resilient. Better at boundaries, better at parenting, better at relationships, better with money, better with time. There always seems to be another version of ourselves waiting just ahead, and if we could find the right morning routine or book or program or practice, perhaps we might finally catch her.
Even wellbeing can start to feel like work.
Another thing we should be doing before breakfast.
And I suppose that is why I have become increasingly interested in asking the opposite question.
Not who should I become?
But who am I?
Who am I now, after everything I have lived through and learned and loved and lost? What matters to me now that perhaps didn’t matter ten years ago? What grounds me? What gives me energy and what quietly takes it away? What have I inherited that I want to carry forward, and what have I outgrown even though I have become very good at living with it?
And then there is the question I keep coming back to:
Does the life I am living reflect the things I say matter most?
That one can be uncomfortable.
Because we can say we value connection while living at a pace that leaves almost no room for it. We can value creativity and never make anything, value freedom while continuing to say yes to things that make us feel trapped, value family while being permanently distracted when we are with them, value kindness while speaking to ourselves in ways we would never speak to somebody we love.
There is often a distance between what we say matters and the way we actually live.
I think a lot of our unease lives in that distance.
You can start with five minutes
This is the thing I want people to understand about the work I do.
You do not have to overhaul your life to begin.
You don’t need a retreat, although a retreat might be lovely. You don’t need to travel or find three uninterrupted days or establish a morning practice that begins at 5am. You don’t need to have finished everything else first, because if you are anything like me there will always be something else.
You can sit in your favourite chair with a cup of tea.
You can stay in the car for five minutes before walking through the front door. You can take the dog around the block without a podcast in your ears, sit on the back step, lie in bed with a notebook, walk beside the ocean or simply put your phone somewhere you cannot reach it quite so automatically.
And ask yourself one good question.
Then give yourself enough quiet to hear the answer.
Five minutes is enough to begin.
In fact, I think there is something important about learning to do this inside the life you already have, because the point isn't to become deeply connected to yourself for three beautiful days somewhere else and then lose her again somewhere between the airport and Monday morning.
The point is to know yourself on a Tuesday.
When the inbox is full and someone wants an answer. When you have to make a decision and both choices are reasonable. When you are asked to say yes to something you don't want to do, or when an opportunity arrives that looks wonderful but something in you says no.
That is when knowing yourself becomes useful.
Know yourself. Know what matters. Live what matters.
These are the three ideas I seem to have been circling for much of my life, although it has taken me a long time to understand that they are connected.
First, know yourself.
Not the résumé version or the roles you play or the person you became because she was useful to everyone around her, but the person underneath all of that. The person who has preferences and instincts and contradictions, who has changed her mind about things, who knows more now than she did ten years ago and is allowed to let that knowing change how she lives.
Then, know what matters.
This is where values become much more than a nice list of words. They become a compass, a way of understanding why something feels right or why something that makes perfect sense on paper somehow doesn't. They help us recognise our non-negotiables, where we want to put our time and affection, what deserves our courage and, just as importantly, what no longer does.
And then comes the part that I think is both the simplest and the hardest.
Live what matters.
Because knowing what matters to you and actually building a life that reflects it are different things.
And no, that doesn't mean you have to quit your job, leave your relationship, move to another town or blow up the life you've spent years creating. Sometimes it might mean a large change, but often I think alignment happens much more quietly than that.
A different yes.
A more certain no.
The conversation you finally have. The hour you stop giving away. Something you begin again because you miss the person you are when you do it. Something you allow yourself to stop doing because you've finally admitted it belongs to an earlier version of you.
Small decisions accumulate.
And slowly the distance between what matters to you and how you actually live begins to close.
This is why I created Know Yourself
I wanted to create somewhere to begin.
Not another prescription for becoming a better version of yourself, and certainly not another thirty-day transformation promising that everything will be different if you can just follow the instructions properly.
I wanted to create a place to pause, to ask yourself better questions, to notice things, and perhaps to put language around what you already know but haven't heard yourself say for a very long time.
That became Know Yourself.
It is the first part of a journey that moves from Know Yourself, to Know What Matters, and then to the much bigger question of how we Live What Matters—not perfectly, because I don't think any of us do, but deliberately, with a clearer understanding of who we are and what we want our lives to reflect.
You can begin quietly, in your own time and in your own home. You might sit in your favourite chair, take it to bed with a cup of tea, spend five minutes with it before everyone else wakes up, or return to it whenever you have the space.
There is nowhere you need to go and nobody you need to become.
You can begin where you are.
Storymaker is where I write about the things I can’t stop thinking about — how we know ourselves, what shapes us, what matters, and how we make choices about the lives we want to live.
Storymaker is free to read and subscribe. If you’d like the next essay delivered to your inbox, join me on Substack.
