Introspection to Find Yourself

Introspection has been a word that has permeated my week. It started coming to me in English class, as I began writing college essays and reading When Breath Becomes Air. In the former, I was asked to reflect on my own personal narrative and identify piths, or crucial transforming points that were crucial to forming my identity. In the latter, I read about a surgeon’s struggle with cancer and how it transformed his views on death, which he had so long been acquainted with.

Challenged to look deep within myself and reading the results of another person’s soul searching, I’ve come to find the value and difficulty of understanding one’s identity. Self-definition is a tricky task, since there are so many worlds and walks of life that we come from. There are many backgrounds that shape us and experiences that change us. Pinning something so abstract into words and phrases can be hard. 

When asked to perform these critical evaluations, this introspection, I found it difficult to pinpoint anything specifically meaningful. There were a thousand fragmented thoughts, but not a single thread to join them. Then a Shakespeare quote came to me: “we know what we are, but not what we may be.” Everything suddenly clicked. In college application essays, admission officers seek to build a portrait of a person that’s more than a collection of numbers or a resume. They want to find a student with potential. They want to find what we may be. Thus, the process of introspection is about understanding ourselves with the goal of discovering potential.