Do you ever pause to consider the direction of your life? What are your choices... and who are you making them for?
The older I get, the more aware I have become that people will judge you anyway, so do what you want.
I used to believe that other people's judgment was something you could avoid if you just chose the right words, made the right decisions, explained yourself well enough so that people would eventually "get" me but that's not how reality works.
Most people don't meet your life with curiosity and an authentic interest in knowing you, they meet you with a pre-existing conclusion and once they've decided *"Who You Are" everything you say and do merely becomes evidence to support that conclusion.
If you stay quiet they'll call you insecure, if you speak with conviction they'll call you arrogant, if you change your life they'll say that you've changed for the worse, but if you stay the same they'll ask why you never grow.
Notice how the meaning and implication keep changing but the judgment itself never does. That's likely because most opinions aren't based on who we are, they're built on whatever story helps someone else feel certainty about what they believe life to be.
For a long time I thought the best plan was to become impossible to criticize, by being more agreeable, more understandable, easier to accept... but every piece of yourself you stuff down in service of fitting someone else's expectations will become something you'll spend years trying to find again.
I think that's how people "lose" themselves... one compromise at a time.
The frightening part is that you rarely notice it while it's happening; you don't suddenly wake up one morning as someone else... you just become a little quieter, a little less honest, a little less direct until one day the life you're calling "yours" seems familiar to everyone except you.
Meanwhile, the people discussing and judging your choices won't ever experience the regret of the dreams you abandoned; they won't carry the hollow emptiness of becoming someone you never wanted to be.
The (difficult) way forward is to just stop treating every opinion like a verdict... and soon the people who criticize you today will move on to someone else tomorrow because that's what judgmental people do.
Meanwhile, you're the one left living with every decision you made to keep them comfortable... which is why chasing approval is such an unfair trade: you sacrifice something real for something that was never yours to control; the goal was never to reach a day when nobody judged you — that day doesn't exist — the goal is to reach a day when external judgment no longer decides how you live.
Stop and consider how those are two completely different lives: one is spent performing, the other is spent living.
So before you change yourself to earn someone's approval ask yourself this one question: "if nobody was watching would I still make this choice?"
If the answer is yes that's probably the direction your life has been asking you to go all along... because, in the end, everyone will judge you anyway. So be judged for the real you, not the fabricated you!
(This post was largely transcribed from one of my old paper journals)
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