the part of finding yourself nobody puts in the caption

I tried the vision board. I tried morning pages. Here's what's actually working.

There’s a version of “finding yourself” that looks very good on screen. Don’t you think?

The slow morning. The journaling. The retreats. The walk without your phone through somewhere beautiful. The moment of clarity that arrives, usually backlit, usually accompanied by a caption about finally choosing yourself.

I know that version because I tried it. Several times.

I made the vision board. Many, many times, and properly too. Printed images. Curated words of affirmation. A whole afternoon. Stuck them on with care. I looked at it for three days each time I walked into my room and felt absolutely nothing except vaguely embarrassed, which wasn’t the goal.

I tried morning pages. The gratitude pages. Three pages, long-hand, as soon as I woke up. The idea is that you clear your mind and the truth rises to the surface. What rose to my surface was mostly grievances. Shopping I’d forgotten. Mild resentment about a Slack message from three months ago. The truth, if it was in there, was taking its time.

I tried the five-year vision exercise. I tried the “values alignment” worksheet. I tried the evening reflection practice. None of them were wrong, exactly. They just didn’t reach whatever I was actually looking for.

I think what I was looking for wasn’t something a worksheet could find.

Because the thing I’d lost wasn’t buried underneath something. It wasn’t a locked room I needed the right exercise to open. It was more like a signal I’d been drowning out for so long I couldn’t hear it anymore. And no amount of journaling was going to help while I was still performing the version of myself who journals.

That’s the part nobody puts in the caption.

That you can perform self-discovery just as fluently as you perform anything else.

That you can be deeply, convincingly busy with the work of finding yourself and still not be doing it. The morning routine becomes another task to optimise. The journaling becomes content. The walk without your phone becomes a photo opportunity, taken on your phone, posted an hour later.

I was doing all of it. And I was doing it exactly the way I used to do everything at work: efficiently, thoroughly, with measurable outputs.

It took a while to notice that the approach was the problem.

Herminia Ibarra writes in Working Identity that we don’t think our way into a new identity. We act our way there. Small experiments. New projects. Provisional roles we try on before we know if they fit. I’d read that and thought: good, I’ll plan my experiments.

I made a spreadsheet.

I’m not joking.

I made a spreadsheet of experiments I could run to discover myself. Which is, I now understand, exactly the wrong way to apply that insight. The experiments are supposed to be messy. Inconclusive. Not tracked in columns.

What’s actually started to work has been quieter than any of this.

It started with Namisan Matcha, my self-run e-commerce brand. Not the strategy around it. Not the planning. Just the actual making of it. Choosing a product because I liked it. Photographing it on my kitchen bench at 7am because the light was right, not because I had a content calendar. Sending a package to someone I’d never meet and feeling something small and real about it.

And this newsletter. Not writing it because I had something to say. Writing it to find out what I think. There’s a difference, and I didn’t understand it until I started.

I’ve realised that the finding doesn’t arrive. You don’t cross a line where suddenly you know. What happens is something smaller and less photogenic: you start noticing what feels real versus what feels performed. And slowly, over time, you choose more of the real.

I’m not found yet. Oh but that that sounds dramatic. What I mean is I’m still in it.

I’ve stopped running the experiments. I’ve stopped optimising the morning routine. I’ve stopped trying to convert every coffee into clarity.

Some mornings I just sit with the coffee. Not as a practice. Just because it’s morning and there’s coffee and that’s enough.

I’m not sure I would have believed, six months ago, that that would feel like progress.

Turns out it does.

Thank you for reading and until next time.

Katie xx