As adults we often lose ourselves, as we grow older. We lose ourselves by not healing past pain, by living for others, and by not remembering where we came from. People often like to forget their upbringing because it was not ideal to them. People like to ignore their mistakes, rather than admit to them. Often people forgot traumatic events because they are too painful to deal with. By ignoring all the things that broke you, it will not ever be possible to be your best potential true self. In order to remember who you are and be your best potential self, you have to heal and clear out all of the pain and past mistakes that have made you who you don’t want to be. You have to accept pain and the past you lived rather than run from it, even pain goes as far back as childhood. It is never too late to heal past pain. Pain is still there even when you bury it for years. Until it is truly looked in the face, felt, and then released it will not go way. Pain is always in your subconscious until you work on it, and bring it forward. People look to distractions to get over pain or forget it. We can't change our past, or pain that has happen to us by distracting from it. By using distractions, we instead allow it to grow further inside us. People that have depression often hold on to their past and don't wont to accept that the things that happened in their lives. Depression can be release when pain is accepted rather than held on to and unaccepted as a real event. You can reconnect with you true self and your hopes and dreams when you let of all the things that altered who you wanted to become.  Although, it can be painful to look back on a less than ideal childhood, or failed relationships, it is necessary to look at in order to move forward in to the true person you are meant to become. As someone that has been through both traumatic events and less than ideal relationships, I can say that I was unable to find out who I really truly was and what I wanted to become until I let go of the things that I didn’t want to define my life. Once you let go of the things that made you lose you true self, you are able to look at your life as an open book that still needs that pages filled in. The light will be shed on your dreams and the person you want to become will the surface once you remove the darkness from your mind. So stop losing yourself by holding on to mistakes and pain, but instead release the fear and allow yourself to begin again.