When was the last time you lived for yourself?

It’s so easy to live our lives for other people, much harder to trust ourselves and our own judgement. I fall into the trap of constantly looking to other people for confirmation on what makes me happy that sometimes I think I forget myself.

I blame it on the social norms that schools teach children. This horrible idea that being different is great just as long as that ”different” isn’t too extreme or confusing for most of us to understand.

I know the world is slowly changing, for the better I’d like to think. But I can see in some places, there are negative changes too. Like how we’re embracing diversity, but people have also become more and more vocal with their dislike for certain groups or even types of people. There’s still this divide except rather than being one-sided it’s also people versus people. Maybe the ”minority” being targeted have finally found the strength within them to fight back but it’s just emphasising the divide.

For ages, I lived in this prison inside of myself. Afraid to do much for fear of being considered weird. People’s opinions mattered to me much more than my own, and yes there have been so many things I’ve stopped myself doing because I wanted to fit in with social conventions.

I wish I could list all of the times I didn’t ’go for it’ or said no, all because standing still felt much safer than standing out.

My counsellor said something to me a few weeks ago. I was going through the latest series of setbacks of the week and my frustration over certain situations. I’ve often found it hard to articulate my emotions and will talk myself down from allowing myself to truly feel for fear of being petty. My biggest flaw is caring too much about what others think of me, it’s often the biggest source of my internal anger and sadness. My counsellor questioned this way of thinking simply by saying ”so what? So what everyone else thinks? What do you think?” 

She put it so easily that I was caught off guard. Because it sounds so silly but it had been so long since I had last asked myself exactly what I thought about anything. Forget what everyone else thought, were thinking, what they would think. It was quite a scary thought. 

How many opportunities have you missed out on, all because you were afraid of what other people would think? How many times have you stopped yourself from truly living because you are afraid of being seen as different?

The true evil in this world comes in all shapes and sizes and yet we fail to see one obvious one in the form of the opinions and negativity of others.

I had a small group of negative people in my life. Their toxic relationship with me really held me back and made me start to have a negative relationship with myself. My opinion of me and the world started to match theirs, I started to change. Recently I was forced into a situation that really tested my being. I acknowledged my emotions and how it was impacting me just trying to pretend to be someone I wasn’t. What was the worst thing that could happen by being simply me? If these people already had preconceived thoughts about me, then what was the harm in being myself. And you know what, when I saw my seemingly normal behaviour annoyed some of these people, I looked them in the eyes and realised I no longer gave a fuck.

Honestly, I just didn’t give a f*** and didn’t care. I’d spent so many years being unfairly judged, misunderstood. I pretended to be someone they would like and that was still not good enough. I had enough. They no longer were good enough for me. I no longer felt like I had to ponder their unreasonable expectations. That was the first bit of freedom I felt in a long time.

You see when you stop living your life for other people, you start to see the world from a new perspective. You free yourself from anchors that held you back. You can finally live for yourself and isn’t that just the nicest thing. If you stop caring so much about what people think then you can live less fearfully, you can do what makes you truly happy, what makes you excited to get up in the mornings.

When you start living for yourself, you can stop letting the opinion of others weigh you down, and you know what, everyone is going to talk no matter what, you may as well give them something interesting to talk about!

So go ahead, love whom you want to love, dance the way you want to, be whom you want to be, the world is free, the world is yours.

Do something to make your parents proud today, your kids proud someday and you proud every day!

Peace and Love,

Jessy