It was more than a year ago that I found this picture for one of my website’s posts. Ever since then, it has stuck with me.
Starting in January 2025, I decided to work on developing my authentic self. In this post—and the next one—I want to explain what happened to me in March 2025.
Bear with me—there’s some good stuff ahead.
Bored
I was tired of sitting behind a desk and not getting any work done. I wanted to do something productive—more than anything you can imagine. Because when I don’t use my time efficiently, I feel guilty and wasted. Like somebody who has wasted themselves by drinking too much alcohol.
I was tired, and I was done with myself. I couldn’t bear being someone weak anymore. I didn’t want to be weak, and I hated being like that. I didn’t have any specific purpose. My whole sense of self was rooted in doing something productive. And by “productive,” I meant learning something new—usually abstract knowledge. But I got to a point where I couldn’t do that anymore. I was simply fed up with pretending that everything would be all right. I needed to rise above my fears. I was scared to find out that I could do better, which might make me proud, senseless, arrogant. I didn’t want to become a self-satisfied, narcissistic prick. I was lost, and I still am—but not as much as before. I was drowning.
Dream in Three Parts
1.
In the middle of writing, I got sleepy. Another dream with snakes—but this time they were trying to bite my eyes. I didn’t give up on them. Then, when their numbers got out of hand, I raised my hand, and from the sky, a red bolt of lightning connected me to an unbelievable power that burned the yellow and green biting snakes. They wanted to blind me, but the sky (you can assume God) gave me the power to confront them. My eyes were lit up with a red, shadowy color inside. It felt like I was connected to a source of electricity. I interpret this story as sign that I am on the right path and I need to be more patient.
2.
The second part of the dream was about living with four people in a rented house as roommates: two boys and two girls. The boys were undisciplined and nasty, but the girls were substantially in order, psychologically and chronologically. (By chronologically I mean they care about their timing.) So, the boys didn’t like me because I was disrupting the environment. I suggested to the girls that we could get a house with the three of us—or with one more person like us. But they were doubtful, because they didn’t know me well. So, it was just a matter of time. They just needed some time to think about it. I think this part was about my psychological flexibility—my ability to deal with different types of people from distinctive psychosocial backgrounds.
3.
I can name the third parts as “Merlin and the temptation of power”. I could talk to the dragon resting behind the walls. It could talk to me and tell me what to do to achieve greatness. But I said “I didn’t want greatness without the knowledge to exploit it.” So it gave me a great library to advance my knowledge. Not just a library, of course—it had everything from clothes to food. Grateful for this blessing, I was able to devote my time to learning. I think this part was about me dealing with my dragons—inside and out. My momentary self-doubts and sense of being lost. And the dragon of my first academic article.
Exposure
There are moments in life when an alarm goes off right in front of us, and we panic. Every one of us will have these moments. But for me, this time was different. My stress tolerance had increased in recent years. So, at the moment of chaos, I told myself: “You just need to find the solution, and no one can help you except yourself. So don’t wait for motivation. Wrap your arms around the problem and tighten your grip until you find a solution.”
I think it started in January 2025, at the same time as the fifth semester’s finals. I tried to face the truth about what I wanted and devote myself to it. I had embraced the English language for a long time, but I was scared of never being able to speak or read like a native speaker. Ever since my fascination with the language began, I had worried about this. But I found the solution in the question: How should I know I can’t, if I haven’t even tried yet? So I promised myself to read and write in English, alongside my university studies.
Exposure works. It’s painful. Maybe the first step for everyone is to face their fears. Most people avoid hard tasks. But most of our learning comes from our limited experiences with difficulty. Before order, we must endure periods of chaos and disorder.
There’s a sentence from Jordan Peterson that has stuck with me: “What you need is where you don’t want to look.” I can’t believe how much this one sentence has saved me. Knowing this, I began to face everything I had avoided for a while. To be disciplined, you need to face your past.
A letter
It’s been a while I follow Jordan. I wrote a letter to myself based on his lectures, which I want to share it with you:
You may accept that “suffering is the sole origin of consciousness,” but as long as you don’t do anything to reduce suffering or transform it, you will remain miserable. And this failure to bear your share of the existential burden will result in neurotic guilt and fear. It doesn’t end there—the more you escape from the reality surrounding you, the smaller you become. Or, put differently: The narrower the box you stuff yourself into, the weaker your character becomes.
So you need to think about what your life could be—if you changed your mindset toward learning, experience, and all things abstract. And you have to outline it, put it into words, articulate it. Words are the roots of your imagination, and the more you conjure them, the more real they become. And of course, you need to align your mindset with your behavior. Every time you say “no” to something that distracts you from who you want to become, you come closer to your ideal self. This, perhaps, is the primary purpose of life.
Your next question might be: “How can I make sense of myself?”
The answer: Aim at something worth aiming at.
And how will you know what to aim at?
Ask yourself: “Under what conditions would my miserable, wretched life justify itself? What sort of future would make me say, ‘This was worth it’?”
To answer that, formulate a plan for who you want to be—and write about it.
Simply put: “You can live in a manner that justifies the fragility of being.”
Which means: “Because life is so fragile, make it meaningful. Treat it with reverence.”
Then you may ask: “What happens if I act as my true self?”
If you ally with truth and act in accordance with it, your life will unfold in a particular way. The advantage of this way of living is that you don’t compromise yourself—because your self is what you must preserve from the catastrophe of being.
A Comment on Young Protesters
Peterson made a comment about young people who involve themselves in protests:
“Human beings are flawed creatures. We have tragic lives, we’re very vulnerable, and it’s easy for us to despise ourselves, and to despise and have contempt for humanity itself. And there are reasons for that—we’re weak, we’re malevolent, and we don’t last very long. We’re not very attractive. We have an endless litany of faults, both as a species and as individuals. So you’re stuck with that, just as part of being itself. It’s built into the fabric of existence. What do you do about that? Do you just go around waiting for someone to tell you what a person you are?”
He also recalled when he encountered the root of the word “slogan”:
(Welsh: sluagh-ghairm = from sluagh ‘army’ + gairm ‘shout’)
From his interpretation: “Battle cry of the dead.”
He added: “People who are mouthing ideologies are the puppets of the corpses of malevolent philosophers.”
This sentence has shaken me ever since, and I am scared of saying one more word from whom I don’t know that much. The words we speak should be the sum of we think and what we live. If you say what you don’t believe in, then you’re being fake.
