Has anyone ever told you: you are your own person?
Eight truths I protect like my last 1% of battery life.
“You are your own person.”
These words have lingered in my mind all week, after a friend shared how she handled her two-year-old’s temptations in an unusual environment: his cousin’s liberal sugary eating habits.
I couldn’t understand why these five simple words left such an impression, until I realized: in thirty four years of my life, no one has ever said those words to me. No this isn’t a pity party.
But if you’re anything like me, you probably have gone through most of your life feeling the same—no one gave you permission to be your own person either, because that’s typically how the world works. If you’ve been given the space to be your own person, then my friend—celebrate—because you’re one of the lucky ones.
It’s likely that life, society, or culture have dictated most of what your life should be. It’s not your fault. It’s a product of our environment, context, and of simply being human—we are wired for connection and we seek belonging.
As a species, we’ve evolved through tribes, villages, and groups, the primal need to be part of something greater than ourselves, it’s instinctual.
We want love and acceptance, but we falsely mislead ourselves to think that the only way is to fit in. So we behave like chameleons, shapeshifting for the false promise of ‘fitting in’ because while we no longer live in tribes, we all have a natural instinct to belong.
That two-year-old boy happily continued on with his day, with no sugar but only pride in his veins. Of course, that one moment was a result of the groundwork his parents worked hard to set, but imagine what your life can be if, at two, you were told— “YOU ARE YOUR OWN PERSON?”
If there was no one to praise, celebrate, or witness your accomplishments and accolades, will you be satisfied with how you’ve spent your days?
Are you living to prove something to yourself or are you trying to win the affection of others? For what?
Are you living to earn your worth or are you living to fulfill your soul?
Dr Brené Brown said it best: “Fitting in is the greatest threat to belonging,” as “in order to fit in, the first person you’ll betray is yourself.”
Here’s the full episode if you’re interested.
Life is a funny thing.
Choice is the single greatest tool we have to shape our futures because it’s the options we select today that’ll sow the seeds of what we’ll reap in our futures tomorrow.
The irony is it’s easier to fall into the trap of fitting in and to live life as a performance, to please others, to “win,”—but are you actually pleased with yourself?
What’s harder is to take the leap of faith and spend time to choose the life you actually want to live—right now, not tomorrow, as you wait for another milestone that’ll keep you running on the wheel to no where. Because even if the thing you want to do disqualifies you from fitting in, will that matter if another pandemic happens tomorrow?
Eight truths I protect like my last 1% of battery life:
The Approval Trap: we live under the spell of seeking praise, acceptance, and validation from others because we’ve been taught that status, success, and fitting in will bring belonging and in turn belonging will bring unconditional love and acceptance.
But if you surround yourself with genuine people, love and acceptance is not something you need to earn. If you are around the right people, love and acceptance is always readily available in unconditional abundance.
Borrowed Dreams: we pursue the idea of happiness that we’ve been sold, through the paths others (and Hollywood) have modeled to us, without ever being taught to stop and consider whether these ideals of success actually align with who you are and how you actually want to live your life. Because life is not lived in the results, life is lived in the day-to-day, sometimes mundane experiences, of the everyday journey of pursuing those goals. So are you satisfied with how your spending most of your days?
