“Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with purpose”

-Zora Neal Hurston

The internet has an overwhelming amount of resources out there. I won’t pretend I’m a professional who knows the science behind all things. However, I did learn how to research pretty well as a history major in college! And where does all research begin? GOOGLE.

Google everything you want to know. Research yourself. Focus on the results that give you facts, not just testimonies. You are your own person. Why you can’t go to bed easily at night may not be the same reason as the big influencer you see on TikTok. You’re going to find a million results, and yes, it is overwhelming, but once you start to gobble up that research, you’ll begin to see a pattern emerge in your searches that will lead you down the right rabbit hole.

I stumbled upon this idea simply because this is a huge part of who I am. I NEED to know why things are the way they are, myself included. Why do I behave this way? Why can’t I apologize? Why is it so hard for me to ask someone for help? Why? Why? WHY?! …..this is a blessing and a curse, lemmetellya.

This may seem like common sense to those who also have this drive to understand the world and those around us, but to stop and apply this to yourself can be extremely difficult. It may reveal things we aren’t quite ready to accept yet. Because we may know why we don’t like something on the surface, but to stop and dig deeper may actually lead to a self realization we aren’t proud of.

For example, in junior college, I wanted to do a research paper on how parental illness effects children. My dad was diagnosed with PKD and had one kidney removed that year and my mom had gone through chemotherapy treatment and a radical double-mastectomy when I was in middle school. I was simply curious. I knew having sick parents affected me so I figured it’d be something interesting to write about. I also knew that I had a habit of internalizing my issues and taking my emotional pain out on myself through self harm and restrictive eating, but that was just me…right? I was so wrong.

I learned through my research that girls tended to internalize their emotional struggles through self harm and develop low self esteem while boys would tend to show their emotional distress outwardly as disruptive behavior. I realized that I was not a special case. The self esteem issues I had and the internalized coping mechanisms could all be explained by these scientific studies I was reading.

So how did this make me feel? Well. The story I was telling myself was wrong. I wasn’t a lonely misunderstood girl. I wasn’t born broken. I wasn’t the exception to the rule. I was the rule! I could have easily been one of those kids in the case study I was reading. It was a sobering thought, “I wasn’t special in my pain.” Ouch, right?

While this was a wake up call to myself, this also gave me something I didn’t expect. Knowledge. I now understood myself in a better way. What I thought would be just an easy, interesting paper to write was now an opportunity to learn about myself on a deeper level and get pointed in the right direction to find support that I didn’t realize I desperately needed. From there, I started my epic Google journey.

So start researching. Look into the science of how we as humans exist on this planet. Start by trying to understand the human condition as a whole and where you fit into that. I promise you, you will learn something and find a springboard into understanding yourself better.

Love and Light,

B