What does it mean to ”be yourself”?
It’s both the easiest and hardest thing to do in the world.
Example: Answer the question: _Who Am I?_
Most people answer by stating the *roles* they play: ”I am a student. I am a worker at such-and-such a place. I am a husband, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, a wife, a kid, someonebody’s son, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s mother or father, somebody’s friend.”
Or they will state their interests. ”I am a fan of ___ musician, tv show, movie, #fandom. Or ”I play video games, I program computers. I like to think a lot. I like to talk a lot. I like to draw. I play music. I write.”
”I am ____ name.”
But there’s a problem with all of this: It answers what you do, even how you think. It answers how OTHER people see you. BUT:
Who are YOU?
What if you had no family, no friends, no school or job, no hobbies, no interests, and you didn’t do anything for yourself or anybody else, and there was nobody who knew you, thought about you, and you didn’t even have a name and didn’t know you were even human, assuming you are human.
Who are you?
How can you answer that? You can and maybe you can’t. Stripped of everything, it’s an amazing thing to try to wrap your mind around.
Well, this is the interesting thing about ”Be Yourself”:
You ARE somebody’s child. You KNOW you are human. You KNOW you have friends or family or people who think about you. You KNOW that somebody knows who you are. It doesn’t matter what NAME you use – I happen to use the name I was born with… but I also have many other names. Most people online do. And nicknames.
And we DO have roles that we play. And we DO have interests – you’re reading this right now. You are a reader at the very least. You are also a thinker.
The point is: You can CHOOSE who you are when you decide to ”BE YOURSELF”. You don’t HAVE to be the things other people think you should be. You don’t HAVE to compare yourself to other people; in fact, you can’t. No two people are truly alike.
You ARE yourself. There are 7 billion people alive. Trillions have passed on or are yet to be born.
But you? This is it. Only one model. Be yourself – you do it better than anybody else already.