Crafting Your True Self: Defining Identity In A Complex World

How can embracing the transformative journey of self-discovery in your 30s lead to more meaningful relationships and a deeper understanding of who you are?

Turning 30 marks a significant milestone in life, and with it comes a journey of self-discovery, calmness, and deeper connections. As I share my personal stories, I reflect on how understanding our identity — our values, goals, and boundaries — lays the foundation for our growth. Join me as I explore the pivotal realization of needing further healing before pursuing romantic relationships and the unexpected joy of building stronger friendships. This episode of the Self-Growth Train podcast invites you to consider who you are and what truly matters as we navigate the complexities of crafting a meaningful identity in our 30s.

Embrace the transformative journey of personal growth by identifying the traits and obstacles that shape who we are. I delve into the importance of inner and outer work, acknowledging past protective mechanisms like pettiness and resentment as I strive to become more loving. Together, we uncover strategies to consistently challenge ourselves, align our behaviors with our ideals, and unlock our potential. Self-growth is a continuous journey, and you don't have to go it alone. Join me as we unveil the steps towards achieving the person we aspire to be, with dedication, practice, and patience guiding our path.

Resources Used Today:
Building Your Identity
‘Who Am I?’ How to Find Your Sense of Self
How To Reinvent Your Self-Identity And Live Your Best Life
My Friends Are My Lovers

Transcript

Frances Marie Rivera Pacheco: 0:07

Hello, my dear passengers, and welcome aboard the Self-Growth Train, a podcast that combines personal stories, opinions and research in order to better guide you through your self-growth journey. My name is Frances Marie Rivera Pacheco and I am your tour guide. First, I want to say thank you for tuning back into the podcast. My dear passengers, I have officially turned 30 and I'm feeling very flirty, very thriving and very hurting in muscles and bones that I did not even know I had. And now, with my older age, I'm feeling all around, but it doesn't matter, because I feel blessed, I feel thankful and I feel very excited for this new era in my life. And I know what you guys are thinking. Which era are you stepping to, Frances? Cause you've already had your healing era, you've already had your Badgirl era. So where exactly are you? Well, let me tell you, I am in my calm, peaceful, loving era. Okay, this is the era where I learn how to work and focus mainly on my self-worth, my self-love, my self-compassion, my self-attention and my self-care. Why? Because there's no better day than today to get started, and I think you should join me on this era as well. Well, my dear passengers, the time has come for us to buckle up our seatbelts and head on to the first stop of the day. That is the topic of the day, and today's topic is identity. I do like the lower note. I did there. Identity, identity. All right, you guys get it. That's the topic of the day. Identity is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as a distinguishing character or personality trait of an individual.

Frances Marie Rivera Pacheco: 2:08

My dear passengers, let me tell you about this episode. I have been wanting to do this episode for years. Okay, and it just never felt right. And like, I've always been very cognizant of the fact that, when it comes to this podcast, I have to follow my gut and I have to follow what I feel. And I was like it's not time yet, it's not time yet. And then yesterday I turned 30 and I was like you know, I really need to keep going with the podcast because I started it again. Let's just, let's just keep on this momentum, let's keep up this domino effect and just keep releasing episodes. And I was like, well, what am I going to talk about? And I was like, wait, identity. You've been wanting to talk to about identity for so long and now it's the perfect chance to do it.

Frances Marie Rivera Pacheco: 2:55

For today's episode, I will be using a couple of resources that I found online and, obviously, my personal stories. The first resource that I will be using. It's an article by Morning Coach called Building your Identity. The second resource is an article titled Who Am I? How to Find your Sense of Self, and this is from Healthline. com. And the last one is the article titled How to Reinvent your Self-Identity and Live your Best Life by Forbes. And just so you guys know, I am not going to be reading the articles. I'm literally just going to be taking nuggets of wisdom from each one of the articles or like skills and techniques that they teach, and implementing them into the episode. But, just so you know, I always put the resources down below because that way, if you want to go back and read them when you have time and you want to really practice what each one of these articles say, you know where to find them.

Frances Marie Rivera Pacheco: 3:52

First things first, do you know who you are, I'm talking about? Do you know what values you hold dear, what goals and aspirations you have for your life and also what things you're willing to tolerate and what things you're simply going to say, uh-uh, get out of here. I don't need that, because if you don't, that is literally the first step to crafting your identity. You need to know exactly who you are right now, because if you don't know who you are right now, how are you going to know where you're at on the path to the person you're becoming? Once you know who you are, you've got to think about what is the most important thing you want for yourself and my dear passengers. I'm going to be very honest.

Frances Marie Rivera Pacheco: 4:41

As you guys know, I went through a breakup over the last year. Well, technically, it happened in 2023, but 2024 was not an easy year, and one of the things that I noticed that I want right now is love. I realized that there are parts of me that have healed, yes, but they're still hurt. There's still resentment, there's still unforgiveness, and I know me and I know my heart and I know that eventually, all that will come to pass, but right now, I'm not ready. I'm just not ready and I'm not going to keep trying to force myself to be ready for something that I'm really genuinely not. So, for this reason, I've realized that a romantic relationship probably is not going to happen with me for a very long time, because there's just a lot of healing that I need to do.

Frances Marie Rivera Pacheco: 5:39

However, I crave love, I want love, I love love, and I saw this video on Instagram, which I'm going to put the link down here below. It was a video that really impacted me because it was this individual talking about how their friends are their lovers and basically it's this idea of I take my friends on dates, I make trips with my friends and I make future plans with my friends. No, it's not the romantic type of love that a lot of us crave and a lot of us deserve, but its a love that goes above the platonic, because you are actually putting in the time, effort and the resources to make it continue to grow and to show up for somebody else and say, hey, I love you, like, I love spending time with you, I want to invest my time with you, and I think that there's such a big emphasis on romantic love and, again, let's give romantic love the credit that is due. Romantic love is amazing when it's great. It's not the best when it's not that great. But platonic love or friendship love is so genuine and it's so beautiful, and I think it's something that we need to as a society. We need to start celebrating more, and I think that there has been a shift recently of, at least on my social media, but also NSA is watching, so maybe they're just sending me the things that I like, but I've seen this shift of treating your friends as your lovers, or treating your friends as more than not with a romantic connotation, but with the connotation of they belong in your life and they have a very special place in your life that deserves to be celebrated, honored and taken the time for. Once you know what's important to you I guess you have to figure out how to express it.

Frances Marie Rivera Pacheco: 7:42

So, again, for me, the most important thing right now in my life is love, primarily platonic love, but also self-love, and in order for me to showcase that through this new identity that I am forming, or this personality, I have to showcase it. So it means going out of my way to make people feel welcome, going out of my way to make people want to smile, make people feel like that they're cared for right, and it doesn't mean that I'm perfect. I will never claim that I'm perfect. Listen, I am a very resentful person, especially with my loved ones, if they hurt me, which is again getting back to the topic of forgiveness and my heart and like all of that. But at the end of the day, the reality is, I believe, that each one of us has the ability and the possibility of changing for the better, which means that the resentment that I feel is towards that old version of yourself, and sometimes it just takes time for me to like heal from that. But I also know in my head people change.

Frances Marie Rivera Pacheco: 8:56

So I want to start showing love to people, to kind of express my identity, which is one that is full of love, and again, I need to work on my resentment because I know that I need to. But for the most part, I am a very loving person. So I think that this year, thanks to all the healing that I did, I'm able to go back to being a more loving person than I have been this past year and I'm very excited to see that shift, because that's definitely a part of my identity that I miss. I want to be more loving and I want to be more welcoming and I want to be more excited and I want to be more everything Like it's just. It makes me so excited to think about the fact that I am going to be focusing on love and making it a part of my identity. Like I want people to literally walk around me and be like, wow, this person just met me, but like she radiates love towards me. I don't know who I'm talking to because I'm looking around in the room, but listen, I want to be like sunshine and I want people to literally walk like they're feeling all the love in the world, and that's a big goal, but I'm determined.

Frances Marie Rivera Pacheco: 10:16

So where are we now? All right, so now it's a time where you have clarity on your vision. What does your identity look like in my 30s? I love to dance, sing, I am multi-passionate, have big heart I don't know, I feel like I'm doing a rap about myself, but like sometimes you have to talk about yourself that way. Anyways, going back to the vision, create that clear vision of how you want people to identify you, and so, by creating that clear vision, you're able to see what's missing in the gap, right?

Frances Marie Rivera Pacheco: 11:09

So for me, for example, I talked about being a loving person. I am a loving person. Legit, I'm a loving person. I love people, but when my body says be resentful, I be resentful. When I want to be petty, I be petty. Is this the mature response? No, but that's why I'm growing in my loving identity.

Frances Marie Rivera Pacheco: 11:32

All right, so this brings us to the next step, which is uncovering the gap. Very simple what is stopping you today from becoming the identity that you desire? Very simple, in my case. Again, we've been talking about being more loving. What's preventing me is my pettiness and also my resentfulness, and here's the thing I wish I could be super mature and be like let it go, let it go.

Frances Marie Rivera Pacheco: 12:09

However, I'm not there and I'm going to tell you why. The reason that I'm not there is because my pettiness and my resentfulness has helped me in the past. It has become a bandage that has helped cover the burns and covering the hurt and made it easier for me to continue living another day. Okay, so this is not just going to like one day disappear. Okay, it's going to take time and I'm aware of it. I'm less resentful and less petty than I was last year, so that's a win, but that also means that I still have a long way to go. So I think that, again, this is me talking for my example. That is the gap that I need to breach, like. I just need to let go of the pettiness and let go of the resentfulness so that way I can focus on just being loving and being forgiving and being super welcoming and just being like, hey, we all make mistakes, everybody has those days. Everybody knows what I'm talking about. Everybody has that way. Oh my gosh, I don't want to get copyrighted. Anyway, any who, any how.

Frances Marie Rivera Pacheco: 13:15

Now that you have uncovered a gap of where you are stuck from becoming the person that you want to become, right Comes the work, and I'm talking about the inner work and the outer work. We have so much work. I'm talking 24, 7, 365 or 366, depending if it's a leap year. All the work that you have to do. First of all, it's totally normal. Second of all, it's tiresome. Third of all, it's worth it. It is so worth it. You got to do what you got to do in order to become the person that you're trying to become, because there's nothing wrong with the person that you are. However, you cannot stay stagnant. You have to learn, you have to grow, you have to heal, you have to experience life in all of its capacity, and so that means that this journey is a long one, but it's not an alone one, listen.

Frances Marie Rivera Pacheco: 14:18

The last step is to take action consistently and intentionally, which means that in my case because again I've been using myself as the example of the night In my case I want to be more loving. That's the aspect of my identity that I'm working on. That means that I need to put myself out there and I need to be open to experiences where my pettiness or my resentfulness might come out. But I get to tell myself, no, no, Frances Marie, we're not doing this. No more, we are becoming more loving. And I need to have those experiences in order to grow. And the same thing with you, my dear passenger, whatever aspect of your personality, slash, identity you're working on improving, or like working to get to, you have to be intentional and you have to be consistent with it. And, trust me, it's going to take a lot of practice and it's going to take a lot of time, but in the end, you are going to achieve the goal. Like, I know that the more that I practice on being loving, the more loving I'm going to become. And by becoming the more loving person that I am today, I will eventually reach that loving entity, persona, aura, that I'm striving for, like I just know it, like I know it with the certainty in my heart, and I wish the same thing for you. Whatever you're working for in your identity, whatever you're trying to craft into your personality, I genuinely hope that you find it within yourself to pay attention and really work on it, consistently and intentionally, because you deserve it. Well, my dear passenger, the time has come for the last step of the day, that is, recap time.

Frances Marie Rivera Pacheco: 16:15

Today's episode discussed identity, which is a distinguishing character or personality trait of an individual. We now know that crafting our identity is not as hard as it seems. It just takes a lot of work. So the first thing is to know exactly who you currently are and who you're striving to be. Once you know this, you're able to ask yourself what is stopping me from becoming this person?

Frances Marie Rivera Pacheco: 16:41

Is it me? Is it a character trait that I currently have? Is it something outside of my control? It might be a combination of different factors. But once you do figure out what it is that is holding you back, you're able to focus and dedicate consistency, and also intentionality, into becoming the person that you're striving to be. Remember, self-growth is an endless journey towards self-improvement. However, you don't ever have to do it alone. As your tour guide, my goal is to guide you with the best intentions and the best research available. Make sure to follow me on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok at the Self-Growth Train Podcast and to visit my newest website, theselfgrowthtrainpodcast. com. As always, all the resources used today have been added to the episode's description. Well, until the next stop, dear passengers, safe travels, bye!