They say be yourself, express freely, be comfortable and proud with your vulnerabilities, always say the truth, be centred and don’t care what people think of you, act the way that feels genuine and natural with confidence and without hesitation, put yourself and your boundaries first, be connected to your core and don’t attach validation, confidence and happiness to an external source (sex,money,fame…), they say love yourself as you love your friend, unconditionally and realistically, always say the truth and be connected to reality. Putting a front and a fake character and doing what i think people want me to do is weak, tiring and not sustainable, so i want to express freely and i am doing it to a certain extent. But i have some issues that are making me afraid to fully apply these things.
1-how can i truly love my current self and keep going towards my better self. Because i want to become a better person but still love my current self.
2-Doesn’t free expression sometimes mean being impulsive and naive. Like what i truly want to do is for example punch a guy in the face but i clearly can’t do it. How can i express freely without being an animal?
3-What if my true free expressing self is boring or clumsy or stupid or unattractive…Should i live my life free but rejected?
Can i work on my true core for it to be more interesting?
4- can i switch in and out of the free expression zone and a character i take at will?
1 comment
First of all, I don’t think there’s any life advice in the form of just a short imperative — Be yourself! Be kind! Don’t listen to what others say about you! Treat others as you’d like to be treated yourself! Etc. — that’s actually meaningful on its own. Life is complex, people are complex, society is complex, cultures are complex.
If you want good advice, you’ll have to look deeper than that, which is exactly what you’re doing here. You’re wondering how to apply all that conflicting advice to your own life, yet find you can’t always follow it And naturally so, because how *could* you always be yourself if there are so many situations where that would either be detrimental to yourself or to others you care about? How *could* you love yourself unconditionally when there are aspects about you that don’t align with the kind of person you want to be?
As a general rule: How good can advice be if following it would make you become a person you’d despise? If giving in to your urge to punch someone means stooping to the level of an animal, it can’t be the right option, if that’s not what you want to be. Is there a way to compromise, i.e. can you express yourself in a way that you don’t have to do things that don’t align with your own set of values?
You’re not your urges. You’re not the first thought that pops into your head. If you want to love yourself, yet keep improving, remember that your choice not to punch the guy — for you know it’d be wrong — is just as much if not more a part of you as is your urge to do it, for you *chose* not to do it. Those urges may be a part of you, but you don’t need to love *every aspect* of yourself in order to love yourself. Your wish for improvement is a legitimate part of you, not some sort of betrayal for your self-love.
So, a better way to look at it would be to ask: What’s the point in this specific piece of advice? How does it help you live your best life? And for that, you need to know what values you hold and how important they are to you.