The halfway point

Shakespeare once said "know thyself" and I believe it was in the same in the same play Hamlet that he also wrote "To thine own self be true". Now obviously you have to know yourself to be true to yourself and in if you wanted to update that to modern lingo it could all be summed up by saying to be self aware. As a human being on this great spinning globe in the milky way it's almost nigh impossible know yourself without also knowing those around you and being aware of all the environment and biological impacts that help to shape and mold and change you as a person. I'm an introvert so I spend a lot of time inside my own head trying to get to know myself. I'm not even halfway close to understanding me let alone the motivations of others on this planet. As a writer I spend a lot of time trying to figure these things out so that I can build characters and worlds where I want to live. People watching is one of my favorite past times. I love to play a game with myself where I'll pick out two people and imagine what their story is. Maybe they're past lovers meeting by accident in a coffee shop and all of the "what ifs" come cropping up and they make that connection again and move on to get married. Maybe they're in the middle of a divorce and both people are struggling trying to remember who they are without the other one. There are so many stories out there that I feel as if I could write till my last breath and never have written them all. Sometimes that thought excites me and sometimes it overwhelms me but in  every case I can't help but write down my impressions and think that one day those strangers will end up in one of my stories.

Know yourself.  It's tricky to know yourself. How do you go about it? Do you trust what you believe to be true about yourself or do you rely on the feedback you get from those outside of yourself? How do you know yourself when yourself is a compilation of so many varied and twisted different elements. Is it possible to know yourself at all when faced with all of those elements. I don't now but I've started a writing project that will hopefully help me to at least rediscover my past self. A story about a young girl whose family is constantly on the move and the imagination or her "secret place" in her own mind that she so often retreats to. I may not know myself as I am today but I know that little girl. She was me, to some extent she still is me. Maybe to understand the me that exists today I need to go back and re-discover the me that was.