ANYONE FOR BEING YOURSELF??

Lets face it , being ourselves is a difficult ask .Sometimes I feel , that most of our opinions are someone else’s thoughts .Most of us live a life of constant duplicity. We waste a part of our life in trying to display qualities that we do not pocess and appreciation that we cannot keep

How many times have we given this advise to someone we know .Just be yourself , everything will be just fine .Don’t do anything else , just be yourself(Yeah right , thanks a lot for the advise , I dint know that!). If being myself was easy, I wouldn’t have asked you. I simply do not remember the number of times I have received that advise and the number of times I have passed on that advise (I can almost associate that with some kind of email chain that floats around in the internet)

To be honest, being yourself is the most difficult thing to do. The world around us has become so demanding, that we find it more convenient to be somebody else. Just to meet the need of the hour , our opinions become someone else’s thoughts , even though the creator has given us only one face , we create another When I talked about this to a friend of mine he was off the opinion that this is complete lack of character in people , this is spineless living , hypocrisy , a** licking to get things done , cowardice , insecurity so on and so forth .

Ok ,now lets not get on to circumstances and situations and lets ask ourselves an honest question .well , make that two ; 1. Do we know ourselves? 2. Do we allow people to be themselves?

Being yourself should,ideally,come naturally but there’s more to it .In our society, being genuine is not given the same importance as being right or being able to justify one’s actions (statements such as “I don’t need to justify anything “ is bunch of crap as the inner need of every human is to justify his /her actions either to someone else or to your own self).Originality is prevalent in all of us but the confusion in the mind arises when we are caught in the drive for acceptance and approval to the extent,where we no longer feel genuine unless there is a consensus among those who are important to us that what we are doing is OK. So we actually deny ourselves the right to be ourselves unless someone else agrees to us .The root cause of this ,I feel , is the inner need in all of us to be loved , to be appreciated.

Do we as a society accept people as they are? We expect people to behave in a way we want them to behave. Any behavior, any view point, any likes/dislikes which are outside our “scope” would lead to speculation. Right there, the pressure for a person to live up to some else’s expectations is on and unless that person is strong enough he will succumb and then will only be capable to giving the advise “just be yourself”. We seem to be always in a hurry to judge and brand people; consider the case of a guy who, when we first met, did not talk or mingle with the others too much and we immediately judge him and brand him as a reserved character or a “quiet guy”. Now even if the poor guy wants to talk and mingle , he just cannot, because he is already branded as a reserved character and so has to live up to his image which was set by someone else. Frustration and utter confusion creeps in when we start thinking of what we think we want , what we really want , what others would think , what are my expectations , what are the expectations of others around us , what we are capable of ,what others think we are capable of and realize all are different. It is exactly during those times when someone whispers in your ear “just be yourself”.

Being ourselves requires a lot of courage and conviction. Children express themselves quite spontaneously however as far as an adult is concerned, the mask has to move for him to be himself.

Rohit Oonnikrishnan.