Who Are You?
It was another strange day in August 2016.
I felt pulled to leave my house.
I was on a few days holiday from my advertising job for a magazine and was inspired to explore my city of Amsterdam as a tourist again.
I got on my bike, my feet slipping as I tried to contain the massive bolts of energy surging through me which had started a couple of weeks previously.
I headed to a part of Amsterdam I had not been to before. Cycling past a few houses that were being torn down, I saw writing in graffiti on some concrete steps leading up to the front door of an empty house. The graffitied words read: WHO ARE YOU?
It was as though somebody had struck a massive gong right near my head, I felt reverberations of this question all through my being, to my core.
I got off my bike and stood staring at the steps, “Who are you?”
The fact that this was a question pointed to the possibility that who I was might mean something different to who I thought I was up until that point.
I was Sarah. I was married to my soulmate, Hans. I was an Advertising Sales Manager in advertising for a magazine. I was a daughter, a sister, a wife, a cousin, a friend.
Suddenly, none of these surface labels seemed to define who I was. I knew intuitively, very deep within me that there was more, much more. Like an ice glacier, the tip representing what I previously thought I was and knew, now I suddenly started to comprehend that underneath the surface of the water, there was so much more iceberg! And maybe the answer was much deeper than I had previously thought.
I kept staring at the graffiti on the steps, “Who are you?”
I got on my bike and cycled home.
I walked into my living room and had an urge (this was becoming a common sensation) to look in a daily diary my husband had gifted me for Christmas in 2015, which I hadn’t much used.
The diary I was drawn to, was a 5-year diary (see image above) and every day, it had a different question to ponder.
I got the diary down from the bookshelf.
I opened it up to that days date. And miraculously, the question of the day was also, “Who are you?”
My jaw almost hit the floor.
I felt excited. Like, my life was beginning to finally make sense.
It wasn't chaos and suffering and hard and mechanical.
It was alive, life was speaking to me, I felt connected to everything. No longer alone trying to figure it all out, feeling defeated, different and not able to be happy and easy breezy like everybody else.
I was finding myself. Finally!
So now, let me ask YOU, who are you?
If you look deeper than our selfie culture, there is an undiscovered part of you, like the hidden underbelly of an iceberg tip, waiting to be found.
Heed the warning of Titanic, “Iceberg straight ahead!”
It is not the tip of the iceberg, the seen or conscious mind that is creating your life, it’s what lies beneath, under the water, your unconscious, your subconscious. If we only see the surface and fail to recognise what’s underneath, you will like I was, be a victim of what lies beneath.
You are here to live your greatest destiny, not just plod along and suffer your fate!
If you are starting to question alot in your life, if you feel hurt by people and/or events, if you are frustrated, if you feel lost, if you KNOW somewhere you are a good person and feel it’s unfair that things don’t seem to be working out for you the way you think they should, then congratulations, because you are about to go on a journey to make sense of it all..
You are about to embark on a discovery journey to who you really are!
At the age of 36 at a time in my life when I felt very confused and unhappy, I started my own journey of healing. At the time I didn’t know that I needed to heal anything. I only knew that I wanted to talk and to release some things – I needed to talk to somebody, a professional, who would listen.
Through speaking to somebody who listened, was non - judgementmental and compassionate, I started to understand how I had become who I had become and why.
I became a character I created through adversity, to manage all the wants, needs, wishes and hopes of others around me. I was not there. I was underneath it all. I emerged at the age of 36.
I know what it is to live with shame, judgments, jealousy, comparisons and I learned to secretly hate myself because of them. I was a victim of these things and also a perpetrator.
The labels above merely describe a lack of self-worth, a lack of self-love.
Our society doesn’t reflect meaningful, deeper-than-surface values.
But the answers and solutions to our happiness are not on the outside, on the surface, they are inside of us. Anything else is a temporary plaster which will ultimately peel off.
With self-reflection and inner work on your healing journey, you will find that the ‘you’ that lives with shame, judgments, jealousy, comparisons and even self-depreciation will collapse.
It will collapse because it is not serving you anymore, or anybody else. And it will collapse because it is your false self, created to hide and protect your true self.
The ‘you’ you have become has served you, it has kept you alive. You are still here.
I salute you for that, you did good, you made it!
Now you can find out how to thrive in this world. Your joy and love of self isn’t dependent on money or material luxuries ( although these are nice and definitely needed in our lives) , it is dependent on you becoming connected on the inside to your source of love, happiness and abundance.
Through inner work, your purpose and sense of meaning in life will bubble up from the depths of you, like bubbles from the ocean. You will start to be guided by signs, led by synchronicity and start to live a life that you were meant to live, as your true self.
“You had the power all along my dear you just had to learn it for yourself.”
The question, ‘Who are you?’ was one of the starting points of my own transformation, perhaps it will be yours too?