It’s the Sunday afternoon where you don’t feel the urge to perform for anyone. It’s laughing at your own joke even when no one else is around. It’s realizing you don’t actually like a band you’ve pretended to love for three years. It’s putting your phone down mid-scroll because you have a thought, and for once, you want to hear it. There was a season of my life where I was a brilliant mimic. I could mirror energy, match vibes, absorb the personality of whoever I was with. I was a social chameleon, but the problem with chameleons is that eventually, you forget what color you actually are.
And that is everything.
Today, I feel myself. Not perfectly. Not loudly. Not without fear. But truly. i feel myself ifm
I started small. I asked myself boring questions: What do I actually want for breakfast? Do I prefer silence or a podcast right now? What does my body need, not what my schedule demands?
For a long time, I didn’t know what that meant. I thought "feeling yourself" meant confidence—walking into a room like you own it, posting a fire selfie, getting that promotion. And sure, that’s a version of it. But the real thing? The IFM of it all? It’s much quieter. It’s the Sunday afternoon where you don’t feel
That’s the first breath of IFM.
I felt fragments. I felt anxiety. I felt exhaustion. I felt a desperate need to be liked. But I did not feel myself . That specific, grounded sense of "oh, right, this is me" was missing. In its place was a collage of other people’s expectations, preferences, and emotional weather patterns. Finding yourself isn’t a treasure hunt. It’s an archaeological dig. You have to brush away the dirt of “shoulds”—you should be happier, thinner, more productive, more outgoing, more settled. You have to trowel past the layers of old hurt and other people’s opinions. It’s putting your phone down mid-scroll because you
And you don’t need to excavate everything at once. Just put your hand on your chest today and say, “I’m in here somewhere. And I’m coming back.”