Artist. Author. Creator & Philosopher.

Something I think about often is what people mean when they say, "I'm working on me." What does that really mean? Lately, I've noticed a lot of people claiming to be working on themselves, but when you look at their actions, they aren't actually doing the work. Do people even understand what it means to work on yourself?

When you really break it down, working on yourself means isolating yourself. It means being alone with your thoughts and alone with that inner part of you that speaks in a whisper. It means actively working on all of your dreams, aspirations, goals, and desires.

Everyone has a certain way they want their body to look or function; working on yourself means working on your health to achieve that. If you want to go to college, change your career, or get a new job, you actively pursue that by studying, signing up for classes, and taking courses.

It also means confronting your destructive patterns. If you don't want to end up like a parent who struggled with drinking, yet you go out drinking every weekend, working on yourself means going sober to break that psychological pattern. If you know you aren't a very good reader, you start reading more books out loud and learning new vocabulary. If you recognize that you've been promiscuous—cheating in relationships or having multiple sexual partners—and you decide you want a healthy, monogamous relationship, working on yourself means choosing celibacy. It means sitting with yourself and asking the hard questions.

Working on yourself is doing the deep emotional work. It's looking at your past patterns and asking, "Why do I keep doing the same things?" It is realizing that everything in your life is a manifestation of what you believe about yourself. As within, so without. Everyone and everything is just you, pushed outward.

But nowadays, I see people claiming to be working on themselves while spending every waking moment distracted. They are playing music or YouTube videos in the background so they don't have to hear their own thoughts. They are hanging out with friends, playing video games, or talking on the phone whenever they are alone. They never stop to just be with their own thoughts. They don't even know what it means to be bored—to just sit down in a room, stare at the ceiling, and feel that boredom.

You have to listen to your mind rattle off random thoughts. You have to feel those deep-down emotions bubble up to the surface and make you cry, get angry, or want to punch something. Sit with those emotions. Hear those thoughts. Don't dwell on them endlessly, but sit with them. When they come up, listen to what they have to say. And after you've heard them, if they get a little too crazy, you reel them back in and say, "Okay, that's enough. I don't want to feel that way. I don't want to think those things. But I see that you're inside me, I accept it, and I will work on it."

The False Idea of "Working on Yourself"

That is what working on yourself means. It's not this constant, superficial excuse of, "Oh, I'm working on myself," used to avoid building meaningful relationships. It's not cutting off the friend who always encourages you to do better just because you don't want the pressure. It's not saying, "I'm working on myself, so instead of sleeping with five different people, now I only sleep with two."

What are we really doing? What are we promoting? What is the world becoming? We have to change this, and the best thing we can do is start with ourselves.

Each person has to take the time to go through that journey of self-discovery. We have to navigate the hurt and sit with the emotions. We must better ourselves and raise our frequency and vibration. We are a collective. We are all connected and unified. We are all fragments of God, pushed outwardly, experiencing every possible outcome of the universe through each and every one of us.

If each of us takes the time to truly work on ourselves, raise our vibrations, and elevate our frequencies, we get closer to that one unified whole. By raising our individual vibration, we raise the vibration of every other fragment around us. The entire collective gets an upgrade. That is what we need to be working on. Like my aunt used to tell me: "Each one, teach one."