On being yourself

Do you sometimes wonder what the world would look like if we were all able to be ourselves? “Being oneself” has become somewhat a cliché, which sadly keeps many of us from investigating further what it really means, myself included – until recently. I guess I had only looked upon that which I considered to be me in a negative way, mainly because being en empath can be seen as sort of a “passive” trait, since it involves caring much more for others than caring about “getting ahead” yourself. Well, since I started taking an interest in the details of what being myself means to me, I almost immediately received help from an unexpected source: my old diaries from about 11–18! Now, of course people change a lot during a lifetime, so one could argue that I would not be able to find myself in diaries that date back around 30 years. But instead of concentrating on all the circumstances, wishes and desires that have changed, consider the undeniable value of discovering what has stayed the same! I was amazed at some of the things that I had forgotten that I felt and thought about back then, that are still true today. Reading my old diaries has really helped me to better define my core self, i.e. the self that never changes. I believe that in our core, we are all love, but I still think that we all have unique ways of expressing that love, and when we do that, we are being ourselves.

Perhaps it is easier to define what being yourself isn’t. That could help us start to notice those situations, so that we can start to choose differently. Everytime you’re doing something you don’t want to do, you’re not being your true self. I’m not talking about washing the dishes or caring for a loved one who is dependent on you. But rather when you do – or say – something just to please someone else, even though it doesn’t rhyme with your core. Hopefully, most people can, to some extent, learn to set boundaries in order to reduce the number of occurences of this nature. Also, people who don’t define themselves as empaths, may not have problems saying no. But what about the things that we hold back on expressing? The things we don’t do, or don’t say, even if our initial gut feeling tells us to? I think that could in fact be a much bigger problem than the tendency to lose ourselves in what others want from us. Especially the notion that other people are standing in our way of being ourselves, which is simply not true! I don’t know who said it first, but I heard it from Jay Shetty and I think it illustrates so well how many of us think and live: “I am not who I think I am. I am not who you think I am. I am who I think that you think that I am.” Each and everyone of us has the responsibility to express our uniqueness in order to spread our love in this would in a way that only we can (God knows the world needs it). Remember, there are no “extra people” – we are all needed. It doesn’t matter how you have lived up until this moment, you can start spreading your love today, just by staying true to who you are – by being yourself :).