Growing up, I had this friend who liked to quote Oscar Wilde. “Be yourself, because everyone else is taken.” She would tell me that over and over again. While it was an important thing to hear as a pre-pubescent, adolescent, the thought built on itself over the years. With the amount of people who are afraid to be themselves, I’m not sure everyone else is taken.
Where did myself go?
I think growing up is tough on everyone, and for largely the same reasons. We’re put in school, like an experimental society. The big lesson of school is not the curriculum, but rather, being trained to coexist with and within large masses of people.
We start to wonder where we fit in, and if we fit in. As social creatures, we want so badly to be loved and accepted by others. It may start in school, but it doesn’t stop there. Adults have problems with being themselves too.
When we are children, we have a more innate sense of who we are, and it doesn’t really occur to us to edit that for other people. Over time though, we get trained by society that we need to be tolerable, so we begin to “behave ourselves”. Sooner or later, we just behave, and we forget who “ourselves” even was in the first place.
As we enter our teen years, we start our quest of self-discovery. We say we’re trying to find ourselves. But are we trying to find ourselves, build ourselves, or recover the selves that we lost? Who’s to say, really? This self-discovery quest can take many forms.
Self-discovery
All this being said, you can’t be yourself if you don’t know who that is. And this is a big conundrum, because the self that we rejected all those years ago was cast aside for a reason: we perceived it caused us pain to exist, think and behave in certain ways. That’s the trick, we have a sort of wound around who we thought we were.
So when you go on this odyssey, you’re looking for some proverbial self that is going to make everything make sense and fit like a glove. You realize that squelching your deepest instincts is causing you harm or discomfort, but you’ve forgotten all about the original wound you were trying to avoid in the first place.
If you do manage to find yourself, you will find that your true self doesn’t feel so good after all. It reminds you of all the times you were ridiculed or abandoned. It reminds you of all your doubts and fears and insecurities.
Accepting the recovered self
When you rediscover a damaged part of your psyche, it can be tempting to simply abandon ship, as you have been taught to do by others and even yourself. But remember your situation. You are hurting without connection to yourself. To be yourself, you have to love yourself, to love yourself, you have to accept yourself. And accepting yourself can be a long road back. It is necessary, and deeply rewarding.
So how do we begin to accept this “broken” person we are? The first thing you need to do is to sit with yourself. What I mean is, observe your feelings and thoughts in relation to your day to day experiences, as well as your inner beliefs about yourself. You will learn how to guide yourself to the most important observations with time.
But this simple exercise is not always easy. In fact, it’s incredibly common to want to separate yourself from your deeper thoughts and feelings that make you uncomfortable. While it is your right to do so, I encourage you not to do this. This is not how self-love is accomplished.
It’s important to let yourself question the thoughts and feelings that you’ve held about life and yourself for years, especially the ones that make you uncomfortable to think about. Observation is the first step to healing these things. If this is problematic for you, don’t give up. There is a sort of learning curve to it all. I’ve written an article about allowing yourself to feel your feelings that you can find by clicking here.
Being yourself is a byproduct, not a goal
You’ll find that after a while of being in touch with yourself, applying self-care principles and getting in touch with the underlying nuances of who you are, that being yourself will come naturally to you.
This is an automatic correlation that is too often overlooked. It is a simple and logical enough concept. If you know who yourself is, and you love yourself to your core, then how on earth could you try to be anything else? It simply doesn’t follow.
But loving yourself is not a tangible, “I’ll know it when I get there” goal. No. Self-love creeps up on you. If you don’t love yourself, it can be easy to mistake the state of being as a switch that’s either turned on or off. Instead, it’s a continuum. If you’re coming from a state of self-rejection and punishment, you will slowly move up the spectrum and begin experiencing states like perhaps apathy first, or ambivalence. Then one day you may wake up and feel neutral. Neutrality may be the highest point of self-love you’ve ever achieved, and it might shock you. But there are always higher levels to achieve.
Each day, when devoted to the self-love and acceptance path is a new realization, a new fragment of recovered peace. In a way, we spend our whole lives trying to recover the sense of self we had when we were very young children. Children always seem to know the secret for true happiness, don’t they? That’s because they haven’t yet abandoned themselves. It’s important to be gentle with yourself on the way back. It can be frustrating when you see how much pain you caused yourself by your own rejection, but remember, you didn’t know you had a choice.
Who will you be when you come back?
When you start observing your thoughts and feelings, you will start to heal and ask the questions that are necessary for doing so. And as you heal, you will find that the very behaviors you judged yourself on in the past may alter themselves or even disappear completely. This is because a lot of us do things that we’re not proud of, in self-defense… self defense from ourselves. We act out because we’re abandoned and afraid, we are irrational and subconsciously panicked. Then we do desperate things that don’t help us in the long term and frankly, don’t make much sense in the short term, either.
And this is the part that may surprise us or seem like a paradox. When we start to accept the parts of ourselves that are so cringey, and begin to love ourselves anyway, we start to transform into what we never would have recognized before. This is the self we have been looking to build in all those years of self-help. (If you’re interested in this concept, you can check out my manifesto on the relationship between self-love and self-improvement here.)
You will be transformed, you will be like a new person. But all this is the cherry on top of the sundae, or the souvenir from the journey, because you will have learned that you don’t need these positive results to have love for yourself. This realization, when felt in your heart instead of just conceptualized, is the true gem. When you have this perspective, you can go anywhere, you can grow through anything.
