I like to believe I’m a pretty clear-eyed person when it comes to myself: I tend to think I know myself well, don’t have many illusions and can assess my strengths and weaknesses with relative accuracy. While I do often ignore that knowledge – I’m frankly not as wonderful as I’d like to be and it’s depressing to dwell on that – I am generally proud of being objective-ish and, you know, not too impressed with myself.

Considering that, it’s astonishing how many times I’ve been wrong about myself. I have believed all these statements vehemently in the past:

– I just don’t like nature
– I would never, ever voluntarily wake up 6.15 in the morning, twice a week
– I’m not a gym person AT ALL
– I don’t want children
– I would never even try reducing my meat intake
– taking one’s makeup off every night is a habit of boring people
– I do not want to learn French
– I’m not good at baking, I’m just not the type
– I would be a horrible mother

I could go on, but you get the gist. As you can probably guess, I no longer subscribe to these claims (the last one is debatable, but I don’t think I’m horrible, just relaxed and selfish). So how come I’ve misjudged myself so thoroughly? There are of course different reasons, one cannot quite compare baking and having children, but the overall theme is that I tend to be not so much wrong as stuck. All these things have, absolutely, been true in the past. They were just less essential to my being than I thought.

People do, in fact, change. Or at least what’s right for them during different times in their lives can change. Things I felt deeply when I was 19, hard-partying and non-baking, just escaped to the city from the claustrophobic countryside, aren’t necessarily things that are meaningful for me now. But it can be difficult to let go, as forming and maintaining an identity is a tough job to begin with. As a consequence, my self-image can sometimes be years out of date.

I’m sorry if this sounds extremely trivial to you, I realise that most people have figured these things out long ago. But as I feel strongly about it at the moment, I want to say it nevertheless: we are often capable of doing much more than we think or differently from how we are used to; in the end it is you who decides who you are and what you do with your life. You can just decide to wake up at 6am. You can decide to read War and Peace. You can take that recipe and bake a cake. You can learn to code. You can write a book. You can break a stupid pattern in your relationships that goes back to 15 years ago and has nothing to do with who you are today.

Of course, if you have small children or an illness or other difficult circumstances, things may not be that easy. Overall, however, I have become a big fan of just doing things. So what that for 30+ years I have been the girl who doesn’t eat breakfast? If I wake up and eat breakfast, I am now a person who eats breakfast. For decades, I’ve been disastrous about keeping in touch with my friends and remembering birthdays and just generally paying attention. Guess what? It is not inevitable and I have Facebook, FFS.

It of course doesn’t have to be so mundane. Want to learn Arabic? There is nothing holding you back. Always dreamed of travelling to Mongolia? A bit more difficult, but certainly doable for most people reading this. Sorry, it’s getting rather ‘inspirational’ now. What I’m mostly saying is: keep up with yourself. In the end, I think the younger you would be impressed.

PS This post is dedicated to my three-week intensive French course that has been very motivating, but has also kept me away from blogging.