The Truth About Being Yourself And Why It Doesn’t Always Work

I have always been an advocate of being unapologetically yourself  because it’s hard to change who you are and the people who love you will accept you with all your faults and flaws but I realized that there are two versions of yourself; the best version and the worst version and maybe when it comes to the latter, it’s better not to be yourself. It’s better to be someone else.

Don’t be the person who’s scared and full of doubt. Pretend that you’re fearless, pretend that you’re not afraid of falling and that criticism doesn’t bother you. Pretend that you believe in yourself in a way that forces others to believe in you but don’t be the version of yourself that talks down to you, that tells you that you’re not good enough or that you’re only good at messing things up. Pretend that you have the world in the palm of your hand.

Don’t be the person who thinks they’re unworthy of love just because they haven’t found it or because it always ends in heartbreak. Don’t be the version of yourself that gives up on love and becomes consumed with the past and the ones who never stayed. Don’t be the person who believed that no one will stay because everyone before left. Act like you know it’s coming, act like you believe God has a better plan for you and act like you were never broken. Act so well that you start to believe it. Act so well that no one can ever know how to hold your pain against you.

Don’t be the person who harms you, don’t be your own worst enemy. Don’t be the one who makes you take a step backward instead of forward, don’t be too hard on yourself that you loathe your own company and don’t be the person who makes you hate yourself, don’t be the one you can’t stand when you’re all alone at night. Be your friend, be the sound of comfort and the source of love, be kind to yourself and maybe after a while, you’ll start to truly love yourself and it’s not going to be an act anymore.

Because the truth is you CAN be all those things and you have been in certain moments, you just never took them home with you.

Being yourself is vague and sometimes misleading because we have the power to nurture ourselves or destroy ourselves and we have the power to be either great or terrible.

So maybe, until you learn how to be the best version of yourself, don’t always show who you really are, don’t invite people to see your weaknesses, don’t allow people to treat you in a poor way because they’ve seen you treat yourself poorly and don’t settle or stay the same if you’re not very fond of yourself, because you can always be better — you can always be the best.