Finding Yourself Through Other People

A lesson that humbled my relationships

You are the sum of the people you meet

This lesson was internalised last year after coming back from 6 months of backpacking. It doesn’t just apply to travelling, it applies to our day-to-day lives.

There’s a reason for the saying “You are a product of your environment” and “You are the sum of the 5 people closest to you”.

Whether or not you want it or agree with the fact your environment shapes you, it does. So why not make good use of the world around you and help it find your truth?

It starts with keeping an open mind, as cliche as that may sound. It’s about using your critical thinking and being able to hold opposing thoughts without losing your mind.

I’m saying this because there can be things we like in people we dislike, things that are similar to us, and things we would like to cultivate.

The truth is, no one is all bad. No one is a %100 unlike you. Just the fact that they’re human already makes them just like you. Accepting this leads to a more peaceful existence and more opportunities to learn.

Holding Opposing Thoughts

In order to truly grow you need to be able to hold opposing ideas in your head and not lose your mind.

When you learn to see both ideas without emotional attachment, and simply look at them as facts, that is when you can make some sense of the world and lead a more fulfilling life.

When you begin to distance yourself emotionally from the fact that there are things people say that you might disagree with, you begin to see them for what they are — human being doing their best. You allow yourself to see the similarities, not just the differences, and you begin to find things you resonate with.

You don’t have to necessarily have relationships with these people, especially if you don’t click and they may even be toxic to you. The point is to begin seeing human beings as exactly what they are — mortal pieces of meat walking around trying to make sense of the world.

Once you begin to pull the thread of similarities (this requires a good amount of self-awareness) you begin to find in others things you didn’t know about yourself.

There’s a 2 piece lesson I learned in the past few years.

The first was around 18:

The things we hate in others are the things we hate in ourselves.

The second part was when a friend was high and beautifully rambling about self-love during a time when my self-esteem was at it’s lowest.

The things we love in others are the things we love in ourselves.

This was the starting point for flipping around my self-esteem.

I noticed how much love and appreciation I have for people, how I always have something good to say and point out the things I admire in people.

I started paying more attention to the kind things I said about people and started noticing that I admire the same things about myself. I started realising that I am those things and was becoming more aware not just about the negative aspects about myself that I wanted to fix, but about the things I already loved.

Learning From Other’s Mistakes

Some great educational moments came from observing friends and colleagues handle difficult situations, and knowing that I wouldn’t handle them as gracefully or intelligently, making a mental note of it to think about it later.

As much as I love learning from my own experiences, I love reading, witnessing, or hearing about how other people handle different situations. It helps me cultivate compassion and reminds me to keep an open mind.

Anything you’re experiencing, I can guarantee you someone somewhere has experienced if not the same thing, then at least something similar. So it’s worth looking into research and learning from the people around you.

Finding out that someone is struggling with the same topic can be immensely relieving. Knowing that you’re not alone makes all the difference.

Staying Open

In order to grow, we must first have space for it.

And it’s not just about making space for new information. It’s about making space for other people and their experiences, emotions, and opinions.

When it comes to our close relationships you won’t learn everything about the person in a day, or a year, or maybe even a decade. But as your relationships (with SOs, friends, family) grow you learn more and more, and it’s about keeping an open mind and staying away from the mindset that you know everything there is to know about them.

When you hold a preconceived notion about the person, you will act and project on it. Whereas if you hold space for the person and that specific aspect, you run the chance of being blown away by something new and amazing you never imagined they would show you.

Learning to hold space for others teaches you to hold space for yourself. Because let’s face it, no matter how self-aware you think you are, there are things about yourself that you have no idea about. You haven’t been in every imaginable situation in life, and even if you have, you change as you grow, which means highly likely your reaction and behaviour in that situation have changed.

When you hold space for yourself and live without expectations you decrease the amount of self-deprecation you can give yourself because you can’t be disappointed if you weren’t expecting anything in the first place, can you?

Conclusions

Every human being is different, and this especially so when confronted with different cultures, yet there are some universal experiences that we can find people to relate with. If you ever think you’re alone, remember that you’re not. Someone somewhere is thinking the exact same thing, at the exact same moment.

And if you learn to hold space for others and for yourself, you might just find something unexpected and life-changing.