What if being yourself doesn't work?

Huge thanks to Curtis for letting me write on his blog! If you'd like to know a little bit more about me or read more from me I'll go ahead and leave a link to my personal blog here.

Disclaimer: The ideas presented in this post are completely theoretical and have in no way been proved right or wrong by any scientific research.

Hello everyone!

I figured I'd jump right into this post because the title is pretty self explanatory.

If you're anything like every other human on the planet (in America for sure) you've probably heard the phrase "be yourself" just about a thousand times. It's been the punchline for many a Disney movie, the last word in different inspirational quotes, and the moral for almost every friendship story ever told. However, what if I told you that no matter how many times you've seen the phrase "be yourself" commercialized in the media, being yourself is not always the social cure-all for all the personal problems you might encounter. In fact, what if I told you it almost never is?

Well, I know this idea is a lot to take in. I mean, I've essentially just told you (if you're anything like me) that your Disney childhood was at the very least a partial lie. Take deep breaths, I promise this entire post isn't as cynical as the last couple sentences would make it seem.

Good? Great.

First off, a lot of people think that the idea of "being yourself" is so clear-cut that you have to posses a very particular, very unique set of traits in order to be your authentic self. However, I've thought about this concept very deeply and have come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as "particular" individuality.

Don't get me wrong, people are different in one way or another when it comes to experience. However, in the sense of personality, I think everyone shares at least one personality trait with someone else. To be clear, I'm saying the unique thing about you isn't that you have a single personality trait that nobody else possess, but that you have different personality traits arranged in a way that might be unique to you and you alone. key word here being might.

Now, being simply being yourself is not the magic key to the door of friendship. A lot of times we simply assume that just because we've heard the phrase "be yourself" over and over, it's the only thing we need in order to become well liked, gain friendships, and influence people. I think even though most of us know that this is not exactly the case, we believe it anyway. Probably because the alternative is honestly quite chilling. Nobody wants to believe that we probably, definitely, live in a world where people don't care very much about who you think you are if it is not directly proportional to who they think they are.

In order to really understand my point, we need to understand what it truly means to be yourself. "Who are you?" is not an easy question to answer. Truthfully, many people spend their entire lives trying to figure out who they really are. I think the problem with answering such a big question is assuming that there is even an answer. What I'm trying to say is everybody has such a firm idea of the person they believe they should be that sometimes we mistake this goal-person for the person we actually are and then we choose our friendships according to the type of people we think our goal-person would be around. Again, I should probably clarify that there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. I actually think it's quite healthy to be around the type of people the person you want to become would hang around. The only problem with this is not being able to differentiate who we are from who we want to become. We need to be aware of who we currently are and be able to separate that from our personal ideas of who we want to be in order to even begin figuring out what "be yourself" means to us. That said, we might still be looking for a direct answer where there are many, or where there isn't one at all.

Another mistake that people easily make is assuming that who you are is who you will always be. On the contrary I think it is safe to say that you are not one person your entire life. Experience has the power to change people (with the exception of some of course) and experience is definitely not static. Therefore, neither are you!

Now, back to my initial topic, "what if being yourself does not work?". I know the idea that friendships cannot easily be made from being some version of yourself is a hard pill to swallow so I'll try to be as delicate as possible.

Being yourself only works if:
1. You actually know who you are.
2. Who you are is the type of person others can see themselves with.

The first is quite relative. "I met my best friend because we love the same anime, Isabella" you might argue. Which is great for you and (on the off chance that you have settled on who you are as person) might be completely accurate. But that still does not mean that being your complete authentic self won you that friendship. Like I had mentioned, people are made up of various personality traits and "lover of anime" is only one of them. I find that human beings aren't often capable of showing different parts of their personality at a time. I mean, you probably aren't simultaneously happy and sad. And if your personality isn't out in full range during the time of meeting, or you can't honestly say that the friend in question has seen every single part of who you are, you also probably can't credit "being yourself" as the reason you've made a friend or met someone. Perhaps being partly yourself, but not fully yourself.

So, what if being yourself doesn't work? what happens then?