Who are YOU? How would you describe yourself? What is it about you that cannot change otherwise you would become a different person? Would being a different person be a bad thing?

I came across this really interesting article about sanity. Reading through it I picked out a couple of things that I thought were interesting.

"if you are mental then that mentalism becomes an inherent, completely entrenched part of your personality.  As such, whether you like it or not, it has become you, or at the very least part of you.  To lose it, surely, would be to lose part of your personality and therefore part of yourself."

I’m going well beyond the realms of being "mental" here. In life you go through experiences and based upon those you build up filters which you then use to look through at the rest of your life. In the case of something bad happening, or in the case where there is novelty and emotion is involved these filters will become mental landmines which construct an avoidance strategy, causing you to feel panic or fear when presented with a situation that this filter touches. You’ll begin to design your life so you wont ever come into contact with those things that trigger a bad feeling and sure enough everything will have a "rational" reason why.

As we age if there is nothing done to change any of these filters then we use them to determine who we are (to ourselves, others may disagree). Back when I had social anxiety disorder I would see myself through filters of weakness, stupidity and others judging me. That was who I was, I was not happy.

So who are you really? It’s hard to say, everyone is in a constant state of change, everything you do will affect you in some way. So you can make comments about who you are right now in this moment, and likely you will also tell about parts of your personality that you have decided to grab a hold of because being that way fulfills a need or a desire to see yourself in a certain way.

But does change mean that you lose parts of yourself. From the drastic change that I have gone through over the last few years I don’t feel I’ve "lost" anything. I’ve gained so much by making a decision to take control of who I turn into. It has allowed me to achieve things I never thought were possible before. And just by changing I haven’t lost any memories of who I used to be or what I did, having said that memory isn’t the crystal clear topic that some may think.

Ask yourself this question: What would I lose by taking control of who I become?

If you aren’t going to lose anything what gets in the way of you making that decision?