Remember: It Is Always Ok To Be You

It’s ok to be you.

I know how it feels, to be rejected, to be an outsider, to be the black sheep of the group.

The one that fits in everywhere, but also nowhere. The one that chooses to live a different life from everyone else.

You start to pretend to fit in. You nod at small talk. You listen to other’s drivel and complaints about life. You walk around in a city that you don’t even recognize anymore. People commuting to work keep looking at their phones, and you’re looking at them, thinking:

I don’t belong here.

Be it your family, your friends, the people you grew up with. Maybe it’s time to accept that you’ve moved on. You’ve grown beyond your small hometown. You’ve grown beyond the people you desperately hang on to, because they were so much a part of your old identity.

But I’m here to tell you, it’s okay.

It’s okay to be you. It’s okay to be this new person that you’ve grown into.

You’ve gone through some kind of crazy personal struggle like overcoming depression, anxiety, trauma, and you’ve made it through. You’ve survived and come out the other end as a different person. You still look the same on the surface, but you’re definitely someone else on the inside.

People tell you: “You seem different”.

And you know it too. Deep in your soul, you know it.

You start to notice the other people in your circle who are different too. They resonate with you. They are attracted to you. They message you out of the blue.

And they start to share their own dark secrets of trauma and struggle that they’ve been through. You are so grateful to hear their stories.

Perhaps what you’ve been going through is universal? That we’re all alone and don’t belong, that we’ve hidden our real selves away, riddled with guilt and shame for being us.

Perhaps we’re alone, because we’ve cut out a part of ourselves that’s too real and painful to deal with. Or just that we don’t know how to deal with.

But when we share, we’re all in that same messy, vulnerable space together.

To know that it’s okay to be not okay sometimes. To know that it’s okay to be different, to not belong, to be scarred but also a survivor.