The hardest battle you’ll ever fight is the battle to be just you, in a world trying to make you like everyone else.

I’m tired of leaking my essence to notifications and expectations. Today, I’m choosing to remember.

We are born originals, but we die as photocopies.

The tragedy of the human condition isn’t that we change; it’s that we leak. Every morning, we wake up, and the world immediately begins its work of sanding down our edges. By mid-morning, you are no longer a person—you are a set of notifications, a series of obligations, and a recipient of other people’s expectations.

If you aren’t careful, you’ll spend your whole life acting as a “user,” an “employee,” or a “brand,” without ever actually showing up as a human. This is what I call The Great Forgetting, and the only way out is a radical, daily act of retrieval.

The Entropy of the Soul

In physics, entropy is the inevitable decline into disorder. Our identity suffers from a psychological version of this. Without a conscious effort to “gather” ourselves, our personality fragments into the roles we play. We become a collection of reactions rather than a source of actions.

Most people aren’t living their lives; they are merely responding to their environment. To remember who you are is to reverse this entropy—to pull your scattered pieces back into a singular, gravity-dense core.

The Paradox of the River and the Bank

The ancient philosopher Heraclitus famously said that you never step into the same river twice. If we are constantly changing, how can we “remember” a static self?

The synthesis is this: You are not the water; you are the riverbed. The “who you are” isn’t the fleeting emotion or the changing career; it is the specific shape of your consciousness that allows those things to flow through you. To remember yourself is to stop looking at the splashing water and start feeling the solid ground beneath it.

The Terror of the True Self

Let’s be candid: The reason we “forget” who we are is often a defense mechanism.

If you truly remembered your power, your wildness, and your inherent worth, you might find your current life intolerable. You might realize your job is too small, your relationships are too shallow, or your compromises are too costly.

Remembrance is a dangerous act. It is the moment the captive realizes they hold the key. We stay “forgotten” because it’s safer to be a ghost in someone else’s machine than a sovereign in our own reality.

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How to Wake Up: The Daily Retrieval

Remembrance is not a one-time epiphany; it is manual labor. It is the work of clearing the brush. Here is how we reclaim the coordinates of the soul:

• The Silence Audit: Spend five minutes without input. No podcasts, no music, no scrolling. Who is the voice that speaks when the world shuts up?
• The Archaeology of Joy: Recall one thing you loved at age seven that you’ve “outgrown.” Your “essence” is most visible in your unproductive joys. Reclaim a 10% version of that joy today.
• The Integrity Check: Notice when you say something just to be liked. That is a moment of forgetting. Correct it in real-time.
• The Death-Bed Perspective: Wisdom is the art of living backward. If you were 90 years old looking back at this exact moment, what part of you would you wish you had stood up for? Borrow their memory.

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The Closing Shock

Most people die at twenty-five and aren’t buried until they’re seventy-five. They spend fifty years as ghosts because they forgot the person they were meant to be.

Every day is a struggle against the centrifugal force of the universe trying to pull you away from your center. Do not apologize for the effort it takes to stay put.

Don’t just do your best to remember. Do your best to never let yourself be forgotten by the only person whose opinion matters: You.

What is one thing you remember about yourself today that you forgot yesterday? Leave your comment below.