Sometimes, you have to step outside of the person you've been and remember the person you were meant to be. The person you want to be. The person you are.

you need to know who you are
or you'll be told who you are

loved ones and society can inundate you
with opinions and information

knowing your values can help you navigate the world

find the balance between embracing new ideas
and not being told what to think by others

I am not what happened to me; I am what I choose to become.

I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.

I found that I could choose who I was, and most importantly, that who I was didn’t have to be changed by what other people thought of me.

If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask... with nothing beneath it?

You are who you are, until you aren’t anymore.

You need to know who you want to be.

. . . None of us are born as passive generic blobs waiting for the world to stamp its imprint on us. Instead we show up possessing already a highly refined and individuated soul.

Another way of thinking of it is: We're not born with unlimited choices.

We can't be anything we want to be.

We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. We are who we are from the cradle, and we're stuck with it.

Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better.

I think that when you remember, remember, remember everything like that, you could go on until you remember what was there before you were in the world.

Become who you are!

Become who you are.

You must know who you are and be true to who you are if you are going to be who you can and should become.