In a life that is a river of flowing minutiae, opinions and trends, how do you not lose yourself?

So many different things have been alive in my little slice of life this year.

I write this knowing it is the same for you too.

Life itself continues to grow and change and move and shape-shift. Overlaid on this is how I am within myself, how I identify as me, and the constant meaning I make of each changing moment in time. Am I being shuffled along by the minutiae, or am I creating the current that shuffles it all along?

There is a push and pull. As I sit here, I get a picture of a cluttered river, so cluttered with the debris of life that I can’t actually see the surface of the water. Each little piece of debris is a piece of one of our lives, carried along by the constant movement of life.

Who am I in this moment? How do I be in this moment, and this moment, and now this moment?

Who am I? What are my real feelings? What feels like my purpose? And how do I stay attuned to this when parts of how I make sense of myself change, disappear or die?

Our personal piece in the function of it all is shaped by what life is expressing and how we respond to it. And how we respond depends on how we self-identify.

So now, let me take all of this complexity of being a single human and join my life with another human’s. We become relational in the river of minutiae. We’re touched from every direction by all the different debris, and we react to those touch points while expecting each other to stay predictable, which is impossible to sustain. We expect certainty, predictability and sameness.

I am this way now, in this moment. Tomorrow, when I learn I have an illness, or I lose my income, or I have a windfall, I will be somehow different. Who am I now? How do I relate to me now?

Keeping a finger on the pulse of “who am I now” is, I think, as important as keeping the filter in the clothes dryer clean. I wonder why people aren’t more attuned to this within themselves.

I think the less we clean our own inner self-identifying filters, and the less we check in and re-check in with “who am I now,” the more likely we are to be swept up in themes, opinions, movements or trends. These distract us from our heart and soul’s truth, and from our most uniquely on-purpose life.

In a life that is a river of flowing minutiae, opinions and trends, how do you not lose yourself?

How do you check in with you?

How do you stay awake to and connected with your heart and soul’s truth, your opinions, your values, and your own measures of an authentic, unique self?

What tends to shape your self-identity, knowingly or as a silent, slow creep, making you feel more or less than you truly are?

What moments make you feel less than, or more than?

For me, self-identity is a pulse I like to keep my finger on. It’s never done or complete. It’s a perpetually moving target.

I like time to be still: a quiet walk, chill time on the beach, in a park or at a lookout. Maybe some coaching or mentoring sessions, or books and podcasts to take in and reflect on. But I will say this.

Last year I deliberately started including astrology and Human Design in this ongoing self-identity work. I didn’t drop the other measures. These sit alongside them. And I have to say, as much as I ground my own work as a therapist in the sciences and in evidence-based models, I learned a lot of helpful nuance through these more esoteric filters. Such as:

My Sun sits in Libra in the tenth house, the part of the chart that speaks to vocation, public life and what we build in the world. So my sense of who I am wants to be expressed through my work, and through relationship. I come to know myself by relating, by weighing, by finding the balance point between me and you. That helped me understand why my identity can feel so tied to whether my work is landing. It also helped me see the trap in that.

I have Capricorn rising. Astrologers often describe this as the child who was seen as “the responsible one,” the one who held things together. Reading that, I recognised a self-identity that had crept in slowly and silently, not one I had chosen. It looks competent from the outside. It doesn’t always feel like my truth from the inside.

My Moon is in Taurus in the fifth house. What nourishes me emotionally is slow, sensory, creative and pleasurable: sand under my feet, growing food, making something just for the joy of it. That is not indulgence. It is how I come back to me. Knowing this gave me permission to stop treating stillness as a reward I had to earn.

Mars sits in my twelfth house, the hidden house. My drive and my assertiveness work behind the scenes, quietly, sometimes so quietly that I can’t find them. I used to read this as a lack of fire. Now I see it as fire that burns best in private, before it is ready to be seen.

Saturn and my North Node are both in Aries in the fourth house. My growth edge sits in my roots and my inner home. I am learning to become self-led and to stand on my own ground, rather than defaulting to the Libra pull of keeping everyone else balanced first.

Then there is Human Design. I have an open G centre, the centre of identity, direction and love. For someone with an open G, identity is not meant to be fixed. I take in and reflect the identities of the people and places around me, and my sense of direction can feel like it shifts depending on where I am and who I am with. For a long time, feeling “different” in different rooms felt like a flaw, like I didn’t really know who I was. Through this lens, “who am I now?” is not a sign that I am lost. It is my design. The better questions for me are “where am I?” and “who am I with?” Because when I am in the right environment, I feel like me. When I am not, I don’t.

None of this replaces the evidence-based work I trust and practice. I hold these charts as lenses, not verdicts. But they gave me language for nuances that more traditional measures had flattened. They made me curious rather than critical about the parts of me that shift.

So perhaps that is part of keeping the filters clean: not one way of knowing yourself, but several, held lightly. In a river this full of debris, it helps to have more than one way to find the water. 

If this has stirred something in you, if you’ve been feeling the pull of “who am I now?” and you’d like some support finding the water again, I have two ways to walk alongside you.

Love ReWired is three somatic recordings with journal prompts. You can do them at home, in your own time and at your own pace. It suits you if you want to start gently, come back into your body and begin cleaning your own inner filters.
Explore Love ReWired →

ReAlign is three one-on-one sessions with me. We look at where you are now, what has shifted, and who you are becoming. It suits you if you want to be met, reflected and guided, and if you’re ready to go deeper.
Book ReAlign →

Or simply start here: roslynloxton.com.au