Nollind Whachell

Becoming your true self is about embracing who you truly are versus what society expects you to be.

Unfortunately in growing up, most of us were taught to follow the expectations placed upon us by others, so as to fit in and survive.

So the real work in being yourself is stepping out beyond these expectations that many of us have become addicted to and discovering who you truly are, so that you can thrive.

Yes it can feel like being lost and alone in an unknown wilderness at first but eventually in time you will discover and find wondrous vistas within this wilderness, awaiting deep within you, within your wild heart.

Transforming yourself isn’t a weekend retreat or a neat step by step plan. It feels like mapping an unfamiliar landscape shrouded in shifting fog. You move forward, backtrack, and revisit areas you thought you had already explored. Each pass reveals features you missed before, not because the terrain is changing but because your perspective and the fog keep shifting. The repeated passes aren’t mistakes. They are how understanding slowly emerges.

The key to understanding life at a deeper level is realizing that feeling stuck isn’t a punishment but an opportunity.

By learning to leverage these constraints, one can transform them into portals for growth and development.

This effectively embodies “the call to adventure” and the wall of stuckness felt within the “refusal of the call” in Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey.

Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled in boredom, hard work, or “culture,” the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved. His flowering world becomes a wasteland of dry stones and his life feels meaningless—even though, like King Minos, he may through titanic effort succeed in building an empire of renown. Whatever house he builds, it will be a house of death: a labyrinth of cyclopean walls to hide from him his Minotaur. All he can do is create new problems for himself and await the gradual approach of his disintegration.

Joseph Campbell

This is when you realize that the role and game you’ve playing…no longer feel like joyous play but instead feels like a hollow grind. It’s when you can finally see the game you’ve been playing because you’re seeing it objectively from the outside for the first time. That’s when you realize it’s time for a new role and a new game to play.

Unpopular opinion: Sometimes you need to exhaust a pattern in order to touch right into the core of it. Until there is nothing left but to look at it. And you see it all clear as daylight – everything you do is a furious attempt not to feel.

Alexandra Lais

While vertical development as a framework does map out stages of psychological development that people can progress through throughout their lives, realize that these stages are not “maps” in the traditional sense.

“Knowing” about a stage only helps you to understand the basic characteristics of it and even then, knowing only helps you so far. To truly understand this new, unknown inner terrain within yourself, you have to explore it, experience it, and map it out yourself.

So your exploration and mapping of a specific stage of development is completely different than someone else’s, even though the terrain may have similar characteristics or patterns to it.

This is why stages aren’t like a traditional map in the sense that you’re not following someone else’s map but are instead creating your own.

So you’re still charting your own path forward, often having to feel your way forward more than think your way forward.

It’s interesting in that I’ve seen two people whose work is similar to my own. However, they do so by primarily focusing on the transition to self-authoring your own life by perceiving your previous societal-focused life in a somewhat negative way, almost like you were an NPC before that just followed the herd.

These people don’t seem to realize (or are not communicating) that at higher growth transitions this repeats again but this time your own self-authored life begins to feel like a rigid script in itself.

So each time, you get tired of your own coding, be it coded by someone else or yourself, and you choose to step out of it and recode yourself.

That’s exactly why your life may feel out of your control. You got to level 10 (childhood, school, job), but now you are stuck. The game isn’t fun anymore because the game makers don’t benefit from you going to a higher level, so they incentivize you to stay there. You get trapped in a loop of boredom and anxiety because all of your tasks are repetitive and mindless and any further challenge overwhelms you because you do not know how to learn. The most important boss fight of your life is pursue your own path.

Dan Koe, The most important skill to learn in the next 10 years