Deepen Your Relationship to Self Through Exploration

If you are trying to figure out who you are or what you like or what your identity is, stick around. My name is Rachel Havocost. I'm a writer and mental health advocate, and I am on a mission to help one person feel less alone by sharing my experiences with mental illness, divorce, grief, identity, and more. I got divorced in 2020, and after that, I realized I didn't really know who I was. I was 31 years old at the time. I'd been in that relationship for about ten years. And so those years of my twenties, when I would have been kind of cultivating a sense of self and a relationship with myself, was spent in relationship.

And so in a lot of ways, I have an opportunity to really build a relationship with myself in ways that I might have if I was on my own. So I've learned a lot of skills and tools for self discovery, but also figuring out who I am and what I like. And this is one of my favorite practices. So I call this solo exploration. This can look like a lot of things, and I'll kind of break down what that looks like, what examples of those are, and then three questions I like to ask myself on this process to really deepen my relationship with selfdevelop.

So solo exploration is really doing things with myself as if I was dating myself. So this could be things like taking a solo trip. These could be overnight trips or even just a day trip somewhere and exploring a new area of town, going on a hike by yourself, engaging in a new activity alone, or literally taking yourself out on a date. So when we do these activities, these solo explorations, there's three questions that I want you to keep in mind. And this is the part where you're going to deepen your relationship with yourself and get to know yourself better.

So the first question is, how do I feel? So while you're out there exploring or on the trip or on your date with yourself, ask yourself, how do I feel? Am I happy? Curious? Overwhelmed? This is good information to help guide you around what you like, what you're interested in, or what your boundaries are. The second question you want to ask yourself is, what would make this better? So sometimes we deprive ourselves of joyful things unless we're around other people, unless we're in company of others.

So I used to not buy myself the treat, or buy myself a glass of wine, or buy the ticket for the ferris wheel if I was alone, because I was by myself and I didn't want to. Didn't want to waste the money on myself. And when I deprive myself of that because I'm alone. I'm inhibiting myself from having a relationship with myself. I'm inhibiting myself with having an experience of being with me, where I am generous to myself, where I love myself, where I do things with and for myself that I would do if somebody else was there.

So asking myself what would make this better, and how can I not deprive myself of that? Deepens our relationship to self and our love for self. The third question is at the end of the experience, whether it was a day or a trip or a date, what did I learn about myself today? And we want to try and do this without any judgment. We just want to come in like an investigator, observing what did I learn about myself today? Am I adventurous? Am I cautious? Am I spontaneous, playful, romantic, nostalgic?

And we just want to ask ourselves these questions of what did I learn about myself today in this activity, in this exploration? Because that deepens our relationship to who we are and our self knowing. I hope this was helpful. I have a lot of other videos about identity and self discovery on my page, so make sure you head there and give me a follow. And as always, if you have comments or questions, please feel free to leave them for me. See you next time.