Some of What You Call Personality Began as Survival

Have you ever taken a personality test and thought, "Wow... that's exactly me"?

I have.

Over the years I've taken CliftonStrengths, Enneagram assessments, introvert/extrovert tests, leadership assessments, and more. I've always been fascinated by understanding people and discovering why we think, feel, and respond the way we do.

But eventually I started noticing something those assessments couldn't explain.

They didn't know what I had lived through.

They didn't know about divorce, grief, loss, adaptation, healing, faith, or the experiences that shaped the way I learned to move through the world.

In this episode, we're exploring the difference between personality, gifting, temperament, and survival responses—and how all of those things can sometimes show up in the exact same behavior.

We'll talk about:
 • Why personality assessments can be helpful but incomplete
 • How life experiences shape the way we respond to conflict, belonging, and relationships
 • The difference between natural wiring and learned adaptation
 • Why some of what we call personality may actually be survival
 • How healing helps us understand ourselves with greater compassion

Most importantly, we'll explore how self-awareness isn't the finish line.

It's the invitation.

The invitation to understand ourselves more honestly, heal more intentionally, and continue becoming who God created us to be.

Links

🌿 Resources:
 Healer & Hope Giver

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Hey friends, I've always loved personality tests. Not because I think a test can tell me who I am, and certainly not because I think a series of questions can somehow summarize an entire human life, but I've always been fascinated by understanding why people are the way that they are. For as long as I can remember, I've been drawn toward anything that helped explain how people think, how they relate to others, what motivates them, what energizes them, and why two people can experience the same situation and walk away with completely different perspectives. Over the years, I've taken more assessments than I can count: love languages, Enneagram, Clifton strengths, introvert-extrovert assessments, church leadership assessments, workplace assessments, even study skills assessments, probably a handful of others that I've forgotten about along the way as well. And to be honest, I usually enjoy them. Not because I think they're perfect, but because they often provide language for things that I've sensed about myself for years. They can help explain why one person thrives in a crowded room while another person feels exhausted after an hour. They can help identify natural strengths, motivations, communication styles, and ways we tend to interact with the world around us. I've always found that fascinating, partly because I'm naturally curious and partly because I genuinely want to grow and be better. A friend who told me a few years ago that I'm what he would call a seeker. And I think that's probably true. I've always been interested in becoming the healthiest version of myself possible. Not a perfect version, not some polished version that never struggles, just a healthier version. I like understanding what comes naturally to me. I like understanding what challenges me. I like understanding where I work best. I like understanding where I need help. I've never been a mathematician, but I can look at a system and usually figure out how all the pieces fit together. Give me a goal, and I'll often start to reverse engineer the steps needed to get there. That's how my brain works. Of course, the irony is that the same brain that enjoys building systems can also become completely overwhelmed when there are too many moving pieces all at once. A few years ago, we were converting our homeschool room into separate bedrooms for our son, our boys, and I remember standing there staring at everything that needed to be done in that classroom. There were books everywhere, furniture that needed to be moved, supplies to sort, things to donate, things to keep. The entire project felt so overwhelming that I practically froze. I just sat there staring at it all and had to eventually tell myself, just pick up one thing, not solve the whole room, not solve the whole project, just pick up one thing, deal with it, and then another, and then another. And somehow that's often how growth works too. We don't figure ourselves all out at once. We pick up one thing and then another and then another, and eventually we begin to see patterns. One of the things I've noticed over the years while taking these assessments is that they often describe parts of me surprisingly well. My Clifton strengths include harmony, relater, developer, consistency, and belief. My Enneagram results have frequently pointed towards type 9. I'm what most people would call a strong introvert. When I read those descriptions, there are moments where I think, yep, that's absolutely me. But then there's something interesting that happens. A few years ago, during one of the biggest growth seasons of my life, I retook one of those tests or personality assessments, and I got a completely different result. Not slightly different, but completely different, which immediately created a problem. Because if the results changed, did I change? Was I suddenly a completely different person? Or was the assessment measuring how I was functioning during that particular season of my life? And that's when I started realizing something important. Every one of those assessments could tell me something useful, but none of those knew what I had lived through. None of them knew about the little girl navigating to emotional worlds after her parents divorced. None of them knew about learning to read rooms before I could understand myself. None of them knew about the loss, grief, adaptation, survival, healing, faith, relationships, heartbreak, growth, resilience, or the thousands of experience that experiences that shape a life over decades. The assessments measure behavior. But behavior has more than one source. And that realization changed the way I began looking at myself. Because maybe understanding ourselves is a little more complicated than discovering our personality type. Maybe some of what we call personality is personality, and maybe some of it is gifting. Maybe some of it is temperament, and maybe some of it is adaptation. And what if all four of those things can show up in the exact same behavior? That's what I want to talk about today. The older I get, the more I realize that understanding yourself is rarely as simple as finding the right label. For years I thought certain things about me were just facts. I thought I was sensitive. I thought I was an overthinker. I thought I was low maintenance. I thought I was accommodating. I thought I might be anxious. I thought I was a peacemaker. And I thought that I simply was wired to avoid conflict. And to be fair, there is some pro some truth in every one of those descriptions. The problem wasn't that they were wrong, the problem was that they felt incomplete. I think one of the mistakes we sometimes make is assuming that because a behavior is familiar, we automatically understand where it came from. But familiarity and understanding are not the same thing. Something can feel completely normal for decades and still have roots that you've never fully explored. That realization started becoming more obvious to me when I began looking at some of the personality frameworks I had collected over the years. One of my Clifton Strengths themes is harmony. And when I first read that description, I immediately recognized myself. Harmony seeks for common ground. It prefers cooperation over confrontation. It looks for areas of agreement and naturally tries to move people toward shared goals rather than prolonged conflict. Honestly, I love that description. I still do. It explains something that has always felt true about me. If two people disagree, my brain naturally starts looking for what each person is seeing. I can often understand multiple perspectives at the same time. I genuinely enjoy helping people find common ground when common ground can exist. I value relationships, I value connection, I value cooperation, and I would much rather solve a problem than win an argument. But over time, I started asking myself a deeper question. Do I value peace because I genuinely love peace? Or do I value peace because conflict feels dangerous? And honestly, the answer is probably both. That's where things become more interesting because harmony explains why I naturally seek agreement. But harmony alone doesn't explain why conflict can sometimes feel physically uncomfortable. It doesn't explain why my instinct is often to disengage when conversations become heated. It doesn't explain why tension can linger in my mind long after everyone else has moved on. The more I reflect on it, the more I realize that some of those my experiences taught me that conflict wasn't simply disagreement. Conflict often came with loss. When my parents divorced, I didn't just lose the version of my family that I had known. We moved. My environment completely changed. The people who had been part of my everyday life simply disappeared. Looking back now, I understand the practical reasons that we know we no live. Sorry, we no longer lived on a horse farm where my dad and my mom lived and worked. So naturally, I wasn't going to keep seeing the trainers and the people connected to that world. But children don't process events that way. As a child, I simply felt like people stayed behind with the life that disappeared. I saw similar things happen over and over again growing up. An uncle divorced and my aunt disappeared from my life. Years later, he remarried. And although his wife has been part of the family now for decades, my childhood memories still associate the word aunt with the person who was there during those formative years. The same thing happened with another aunt's divorce later on. Her former husband still is the person who first comes to mind when I think about my uncle, because those early relationships become deeply anchored in the memory. I've always found that fascinating. Not because I struggle to accept change, but because relationships deeply matter to me. And because I never fully understood why adults seem so willing to erase entire chapters of connection when conflict entered the picture. I remember seeing this play out in churches. I remember watching friendships disappear after divorces, and I remember seeing people choose sides and draw lines and act as though years of shared history suddenly no longer matter. One experience in particular has stayed with me for years. I attended the funeral of a close friend's father. It was one of those moments where you expect people to focus on what truly matters, the life that was lost and the family that's left behind. But some individuals from a former church greeted me warmly and began making conversation. Everything felt completely normal until I mentioned that I was working with this same friend again. And the moment I said his name, the conversation and the mood changed. There wasn't an argument, there wasn't a confrontation, there was simply an uncomforta uncomfortable pause followed by an abrupt end to the interaction. I remember walking away thinking, we're standing at a funeral. Surely if there was ever a place to set old grievances aside, it would be here. But apparently not. And moments like that have always fascinated me because my mind simply doesn't work that way. I understand disagreements, I understand hurt feelings, I understand boundaries, I can understand distance when it's necessary, but I've never understood why conflict has to erase every good thing that became before it. In fact, one of the times that I felt most strongly about was when my sister-in-law got divorced. More than anything, I found myself advocating for her daughter. I didn't want that sweet little girl hearing negative things about her father from people around her. I didn't want her carrying adult conflicts that she had would never have been asked to inherit. Maybe that's because I knew what that felt like. She didn't choose her parents any more than I chose mine. She deserved the freedom to love them both. And the older I get, the more I realize those experiences shaped how I think about conflict, loyalty, relationships, and even belonging. Personality assessment can tell me that I value harmony. What it can't tell me is why fractured relationships affect me so deeply. It can't tell me about the years I watched conflict lead to separation. It can't tell me about the experiences that taught me relationships could disappear unexpectedly. It can't tell me why preserving connection feels emotionally important to me. Those aren't personality traits, they're life experiences. And I think that's where self-discovery becomes far more interesting than self-labeling. Because when we start looking beneath the behaviors themselves, we often discover multiple influences operating at the same time. Maybe you are naturally peaceful, maybe you are deeply empathetic, maybe you're highly relational, maybe you've learned to avoid volatility because it once felt unsafe. Maybe all of those things are true all at the same time. And I think that's what I've been slowly learning. The goal isn't to figure out which single label explains me, or even you, my friend. The goal is to understand the many different experiences, gifts, strengths, and adaptations that all contributed to the person that we've become. I think this is where the conversation becomes even more interesting for me. Because for a long time, personality frameworks felt incredibly helpful. And to be clear, I still think that they are. I still enjoy them. I still find value in them. I still think they can provide language for understanding how we naturally move through the world. Even those silly ones on Facebook. Somehow I can almost always see a little piece of it that fits. The problem isn't that the assessments are wrong. The problem is that they aren't able to tell the whole story. A few years ago, during one of the biggest growth seasons in my life, I decided to retake one of the personality assessments I had completed before. I wasn't expecting anything dramatically different. I assumed the results would be mostly the same, maybe with a few minor differences. Instead, I got a completely different result. And I remember staring at the screen thinking, well, that's unexpected. Because now I had a problem. If the assessment changed, did I change? Was I completely different than the person that I had been before for most of my life? Or was the assessment measuring how I was functioning during that particular season? The more I thought about it, the more I realized the assessments can only evaluate the answers that we give them. And the answers we give are often influenced by our current current circumstances. If you're burned out, you might answer differently than when you're thriving. If you're carrying fresh wounds, you answer differently than when you have had time to heal. If you're exhausted, discouraged, overwhelmed, grieving, growing, rebuilding, or rediscovering yourself, all of these experiences influence how you see yourself in that moment. And yet, underneath all those changing seasons, you're still the same person. That realization changed the way I look at every personality framework work from that point on. Because suddenly I wasn't asking which result was correct anymore. I was asking a different question. What exactly had changed? I was still the same person, still had the same history, the same strengths, the same experiences, the same relationships, and basically the same life. So why had the answers shifted so dramatically? The more I thought about it, the more I realized the assessment wasn't necessarily measuring who I was. It was measuring how I was experiencing myself in that particular season. And the truth is, when I thought about it that way, it made perfect sense. When you're burned out, you answer differently when you're thriving. When you're wounded, your answer is different than when you've had time to heal. And when you're growing, rebuilding, grieving, or rediscovering things, all of those influence how you see your own behaviors. That assessment wasn't wrong. It just wasn't telling the whole story. And honestly, I think that's where self-discovery becomes more fascinating than self-labeling. Because the deeper question isn't what's my type? The deeper question is what's actually driving this behavior. Take introversion, for example. I've always been an introvert. Not occasionally, not depending on the season, not when life is stressful, always. I recharge through quiet. I love books. I love writing. I love having space to think. I love meaningful conversations with people that I trust. And after several days of meetings, church activities, family events, social gatherings, and obligations stacked on top of each other, I can practically feel my internal battery draining in real time. A few weeks ago, I had one of those stretches where every day seemed to have something scheduled. Nothing was bad. Most of it was actually enjoyable. There were people I genuinely loved spending time with. But by the end of it, I was absolutely bone tired, exhausted. And looking back, that's not unusual for me. In fact, when I look back over the years, I've noticed that some of my busiest seasons have ended with me getting sick. It's almost as if my body eventually says, We're done now, and forces a reset whether I planned one or not. And for a long time I probably treated all of that the same way. If I was exhausted after too much social interaction, I assumed it was something I needed to push through. But the older I get, the more I realize that some things aren't wounds to heal. Some things are simply part of how God designed us. Needing quiet doesn't mean something is wrong with me. It means I recharge differently. The older I get, the more I learned to respect the reality instead of fighting it. But here's where things start getting interesting. Not because everything I've avoided came from the same place. A few years ago, I was invited to a wedding where I knew there would be people present with whom I had unresolved conflict. I could have magically removed those interactions from the day, and I absolutely would have. Or if I could have, I absolutely would have. Not because I was tired, not because I needed solitude, and not because I was overwhelmed being around people. I simply didn't want to experience that tension. The couple getting married, though, mattered deeply to me. So staying home wasn't really an option. I was going regardless of how uncomfortable it felt. But the day, as the day approached, I could feel myself mentally preparing for every possible interaction. What if it's awkward? What if they ignore me? What if there's a confrontation? What if things become uncomfortable? And looking back now, that wasn't introversion talking, that was self-protection. And interestingly enough, the unresolved conflict ended peacefully within a couple days after the wedding. The thing I had spent all that energy anticipating never became the disaster that my nervous system was preparing for. That experience taught me something important. Needing rest and avoiding discomfort are not the same thing. One comes from wiring and the other comes from experience. And once I started noticing distinctions like that, I began seeing them everywhere. The same thing happened when I looked at my Clifton strengths. Harmony is one of the strongest themes, and I genuinely believe that it reflects part of how God wired me. I like finding common ground. I like have helping people to work together. I like cooperation. I like solutions. I like seeing multiple perspectives. Even when I disagree with someone, I can usually understand how they arrived at their conclusion. That's a strength. But my fear of conflict isn't entirely explained by harmony, because harmony doesn't explain why conflict became associated with loss. Life experience explains that. Growing up, I watched relationships disappear after divorces. I watched families split into sides. I watched friendships end over disagreements. I've watched people erase years of connection because conflict entered the room. As a child, those experiences quietly taught me that disagreement often came with separation. And if separation hurts, of course, part of you starts trying to prevent it. Suddenly the behavior looked like peacemaking wasn't always coming from the same place. Sometimes I was pursuing peace because I genuinely valued peace. Sometimes I was Pursuing it because I feared what might happen if peace disappeared. Same behavior, different motivation. And honestly, I think many of us discover this if we're willing to look deeply enough. The behavior itself isn't always the story. The story lives underneath the behavior. That's why two people can appear almost identical from the outside while being driven by completely different things internally. One person may avoid conflict because they're naturally cooperative, and another may avoid conflict because they're afraid of losing connection. One person may enjoy solitude because they're introverted, and another may isolate because they're hurting. One person may be highly responsible because they're gifted in organization, and another may feel responsible for everything because they learned very young that someone had to hold things together. The behaviors may look nearly identical, but the roots are often very different. And the more I reflected on that reality, the more compassionate I became about myself. Because instead of asking what was wrong with me, I started asking what these patterns had been trying to accomplish all along. And truthfully, that's one of the kindest questions that we can ask ourselves. One of the things that surprises me the most as I get older is how differently I see my younger self than I used to. For a long time, I looked back at parts of my story and saw weakness. I saw someone who worried too much, felt things too deeply, replayed conversations long after they ended, and worked harder than she probably should have to keep relationships intact. I saw someone who carried responsibility that wasn't always hers to carry, someone who had spent tremendous amounts of energy making sure everyone else was okay before asking whether she was okay herself. And in reality, if I'm not careful, I can slip into that way of seeing myself sometimes. But when I step back now, I can look at some of those same experiences through older eyes, and I don't see weak weakness the way I once did. I see resilience, not the flashy kind of resilience that gets written about in inspirational books, and not the kind where someone conquers a mountain and emerges emerges victorious at the end of the movie. I mean the ordinary kind, the kind that quietly survives, the kind that adapts, the kind that keeps moving forward before fully understanding what it's carrying. Because when I looked back now, I don't see a weak little girl. I see a little girl who learned how to board airplanes by herself because that was simply what life required. One of the things I understand now is that I never could have explained as a child how often change seemed to arrive while I was sleeping. I went to bed on New Year's Eve one year, expecting the next day to feel like every other holiday, and instead I woke up to discover my parents had left town in the middle of the night because my grandfather had passed away. A little over a year later, I went to sleep believing everything was normal, and when I woke up, my father and sister had moved out. The divorce had begun, and looking back now it's easier to see why uncertainty became such a familiar companion. Not because anyone intentionally taught me to expect loss, but because life kept delivering it unexpectedly. Things changed while I slept. Relationships changed while I slept. Entire chapters of life seemed capable of ending overnight. And when experiences like that happen often enough, a child doesn't usually develop a sophisticated explanation. They simply learn to stay alert. I see a little girl learning how to navigate two very different worlds without ever being asked whether she wanted that responsibility. I see someone trying to make sense of an adult emotions before she was old enough to understand her own. I see someone learning how to belong in multiple places while never feeling fully settled in either one. And honestly, that's a lot for a child. For years I looked at that little girl and saw weakness. Now I see something very different. I wasn't weak. I was carrying things that were meant for people much older than I was. And somehow, despite not having the language or maturity to fully understand what was happening around me, I kept moving forward. I don't say that with bitterness, and I don't say it with blame, I say it with compassion. Because children don't get to choose the environments they grow up in. They simply learn how to function within them. And the older I get, the more amazed I become at how adaptable children really are. I think that's one of the reasons I find this whole conversation so fascinating. For years I thought certain patterns were evidence that something was wrong with me. And now I wonder if many of them were evidence that something was very right with me. Not because every coping mechanism was healthy, and not because every adaptation should stay forever, but because they accomplished exactly what they were trying to accomplish. They helped me survive seasons I wasn't equipped to navigate any other way. Take hyper awareness, for example. For years, I thought I was simply too emotional. I could walk in a room and immediately tell when something felt different. Maybe it was a change in tone, maybe it was a change in body language, maybe it was simply the feeling that something wasn't being said out loud. I could feel the tension in the air. I couldn't always explain it, but I noticed it. And if I'm being truthful, there were times I wished I could turn that off. It felt exhausting, but now I see it differently. If you spell spent years navigating environments where emotional, the emotional weather could change quickly, paying attention becomes useful. You learn to observe, you learn to anticipate, you learn to notice things. At the time, I wasn't consciously developing a skill. I was simply adapting to the moment I was living in. What's funny is that decades later, people often describe those same tendencies as empathy or emotional intelligence. And maybe sometimes they are. I don't, but I don't know that some of it was adaptation. And that's where this gets complicated because sometimes our strengths and our adaptations grow together. Sometimes it's difficult to separate where one ends and the other begins. The same thing happened with my tendency to see multiple perspectives. I genuinely believe that that is part of how God wired me. I have always been able to understand how different people arrive at different conclusions. Even when I disagree with someone, I can often understand the path that got them to their position. And that ability has served me well through life. It has helped in friendships, marriage, leadership, church work, parenting, and pretty much everywhere else. But I also wonder if part of that skill was sharpened by necessity. When you grow up navigating different viewpoints, different expectations, different emotional realities, you become practiced at seeing through more than one lens at the same time. Not because you're trying to become wise, but because you're trying to understand the world that you're living in. And maybe that's the thing that I've been realizing lately. Not every adaptation becomes a weakness. Sometimes it becomes a strength or even a superpower, if you will. Sometimes the very thing that helped you survive becomes one of the gifts you eventually offer to other people. The challenge is learning when you're using it as a gift freely and when you're still operating from fear, because those are not the same thing. I can seek peace because I genuinely value peace, or I can seek peace because I'm afraid of what conflict might cost me. I can help people because I love helping people, or I can help people because I'm afraid that they won't value me without helping. I can understand someone else's perspective because I care about them, or because I've spent time trying to prevent disconnection. The behavior can look identical from the outside, but the motivation underneath it changes everything. I think that's what I've been learning through this entire season of healing. The goal isn't to eliminate every adaptation I've ever developed. The goal is to understand why it exists and keep what still serves me and release what no longer does. And I'm and learning the difference between who I am and what I learned along the way. One of the things I've been really realizing lately is that self-awareness does not not actually, it's not actually the finish line. For a long time, I think I believed that if I could just understand myself well enough, everything would suddenly make sense. It would all click. If I could identify the right personality type, understand my strengths, recognize my patterns, and connect enough dots from my past, I would finally arrive at some place where all the pieces fit together neatly. And the older I get, the less I believe that that's how life works. Understanding ourselves matters. In fact, I think it's one of the reasons I've always been drawn to things like personality assessments in the first place. I genuinely want to understand why I do what I do. But eventually I realized understanding isn't the destination. It's just like weight loss. The goal weight is not the destination, it's the starting point. At some point, you have to decide what you're going to do with what you've learned. Because knowing why I avoid conflict doesn't automatically teach me how to engage in healthy conflict. Knowing why I struggle with boundaries doesn't automatically make setting them easier. Knowing why I overthink doesn't suddenly make every anxious thought be quiet. Awareness is powerful, but awareness itself isn't transformation. What changes us is what we choose to do with that awareness moving forward. And honestly, I think that's where some of the most meaningful healing has happened for me. Not in discovering the patterns, in choosing differently when I recognize them. One of the clearest examples is in relationships. For years, I spent an enormous amount of emotional energy focused on the people who left, the friendships that changed, the relationships that ended, the people who drifted away, the connections that didn't survive life's transitions. And to be fair, those losses mattered. Some of them hurt deeply. Some of them still make me sad to think about them. But somewhere along the way, I started noticing what I had overlooked for years. There were people who stayed. I just wasn't looking at them as closely as I was looking at the people who left. Looking back now, they were always there. Friends who kept showing up, family members who remained steady, people who continued choosing the relationship long after life became complicated, people who disagreed with me and still loved me, people who misunderstood me occasionally and stayed anyway, people who saw my flaws and remained invested. The more I pay attention to those people, the more I realize that healthy relationships don't require perfection. They require commitment. They require grace. They require communication. They require two people willing to work through misunderstandings instead of immediately walking away. And that realization has changed the way I think about connection. Today, I still don't enjoy conflict, and I probably never will. I still prefer cooperation over confrontation. I still look for common ground wherever possible. I still value peace. But peace means something different to me than it once did. When I was younger, peace meant the absence of tension. Now I think peace is the ability to remain grounded even when tension exists. That's a very different thing. Because real relationships eventually encounter disagreement. Real families encounter disagreement. Real friendships encounter disagreement. Marriages encounter lots of disagreement. The goal isn't avoiding every difficult conversation. The goal is learning that difficult conversations don't automatically threaten your belonging. That's been one of the most healing lessons of my adult life. Not everyone leaves. Not every disagreement becomes separation. Not every misunderstanding becomes a rejection. Not every conflict becomes a catastrophe. These days, that realization has created more freedom than almost anything else. It has allowed me to speak up sooner, trust my perspective a little more, to stop carrying responsibility for everyone's reactions, to let people disagree with me without immediately assuming the relationship is in danger. Not perfectly, I'm still learning, but differently than I once did. And maybe that's what growth actually looks like. Not becoming a completely different person and not erasing every old pattern, not arriving at some magical destination where we've figured everything out. Not the finish line, if you will. Maybe growth looks more like becoming increasingly more honest about who we are and what shaped us and what we want to carry forward from here. Because the truth is there are parts of me that I want to keep. Those things are gifts. But there are other things that I'm learning to release. The belief that everyone must understand me. The belief that every disagreement automatically threatens connection. The belief that my worth depends on keeping everyone happy. The belief that I must constantly earn my belonging or my way into a room. Those things served a purpose once, but they don't need to lead anymore. Honestly, that's one of the most hopeful discoveries I've made through healing. We don't have to reject our entire story to grow. We can honor what helped us survive while also choosing what helps us thrive. One of the unexpected gifts of healing is that it doesn't just help you understand your past differently, it helps you experience your present differently. I spend less time trying to predict every possible outcome, less time assuming conflict automatically means rejection, less time believing every misunderstanding is just the beginning of an end. Not because difficult things never happen anymore. They do, and it's not perfect every day. Some days those things get stirred up a little more again, but then they settle back down. And I trust myself more than I used to, and I trust God more than I used to. And that changes how you move through the world. One of the reasons I've been fascinated by personality assessments, strengths, and self-discovery is because I genuinely enjoy learning. I enjoy understanding people. I enjoy understanding myself. I enjoy connecting the dots that I hadn't seen before. But the older I get, the less interested I am in finding a label that perfectly explains me. And maybe that's because life keeps changing us. Life keeps handing us new experiences, some joyful, some incredibly painful. Some of them stretch us in ways that we never expected. We gain wisdom. We discover strength that we didn't know we had. We uncover beliefs we didn't realize we were carrying. And if we're paying attention, we continue growing day after day after day. And if we're fortunate, we continue becoming. Not because it gives us all the answers, but it gives us the freedom to keep asking better questions, to keep growing intentionally, to keep becoming more fully ourselves. This past weekend I celebrated my birthday. And one of the gifts I received with a note, actually, not a note. Um, she she gave me the gift, um, and then she pulled me aside. And she told me that she believes I'm a rising star and hopes that she'll get to see me sharing my writing and speaking to people while she's still alive. She's in her 80s, so she added that last part with a laugh, but she truly sees something in me that she would like to see spread and uh to a bigger audience. And a young, younger version of me probably would have immediately dismissed that, explained it away, focused on why she was wrong. These days I'm trying to hold these moments differently. Not because I suddenly think I have everything figured out, but because I'm learning that maybe some people sometimes see things in us that we're still learning about ourselves. And maybe that's true for you too. Maybe there are strengths in you that you haven't fully emerged yet. Maybe there are gifts that you don't understand or have underestimated. Maybe there are parts of your story that once felt like liabilities that God is quietly transforming into something meaningful. Maybe you're still becoming, actually, we all are. But truthfully, I think that's the good news because understanding ourselves isn't the destination, it's the invitation, the invitation to live more intentionally, to love more freely, to heal more honestly, to use our experiences for good, to keep growing for as long as God gives us breath and keep becoming safer inside our own lives. If today's conversation resonated with you, there are a few episodes that connect naturally to what we explored today. Episode 20, Why You Don't Trust Your Voice in the Moment. Episode 22, Is It Really Peace If It Costs You Yourself? And Episode 24, How Childhood Shapes the Way You See Yourself. Together, these conversations explore how our experiences shape identity, belonging, peace, and the way we move through relationships. And if you're someone who enjoys processing through journaling and reflection, I've also created companion guides and workbooks that come go with these episodes. The one for this particular episode will include reflection questions, exercises, and tools to help you explore the difference between your natural wiring, your strengths, and the adaptations that you developed through your life. You can find that guide along with all of the other companion resources at healerhopegiver.com. Hey friends, thank you for spending part of your day with me. If this episode spoke to you, I genuinely would love to hear about it. I read every message, every comment, every email, and hearing your stories is one of the most meaningful parts of creating this podcast. If something in today's conversation helps put words to an experience you've struggled to explain, send me a message and tell me about it. And if you know someone who has ever wondered why they think the way they think, react the way they react, or struggle with patterns they can't quite understand, I hope you'll share this episode with them and invite them into this space. Because healing becomes a little less lonely when we realize we're not the only ones asking these questions. If you'd like to explore these concepts deeper within your life, you can always find episodes, resources, companion guides, workbooks, and more over at healerhopegiver.com. And if you've already, if you haven't already, make sure you're following the podcast wherever you listen. Whether it's Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast app, following the show helps more people discover these conversations and join our growing community. As always, thank you for being here, thank you for listening, and thank you for allowing this space to be one where healing, faith, and honest conversations can coexist together. I'll meet you back here Thursday for the Devotional episode where we're going to spend some time reflecting on the God who knows us completely, even in the seasons when we're still discovering ourselves. Until next time, keep becoming safer inside your own life.