This is a blog I wrote in 2014 when I was 27. I volunteered for 4 months teaching English in a school in a Mestizo community in the Amazon Jungle in Ecuador.
Source https://mikolashuzaurus.wordpress.com/
Be yourself.
What does that even mean?
We’re told from very early on to ‘just’ be ourselves, but no one ever tells you who that is. Besides, you’ve been getting mixed messages. You should be yourself, confined to the tightly knit position you’re supposed to fill in society. Be yourself, unless yourself wants to misbehave. Be yourself while staying inside the margins of your character-sheet.
How many people do you know who are really themselves? How easy is it to be? I don’t think school is a very good system for developing individuality. University? Work? The army for Christ’s sake??
We seem to have a layer of fake principles that we tell our kids in kindergarten and primary school - Don’t cheat. Don’t fight. Use your words - but somewhere along the way it vanishes. And that’s probably why there are so many six year olds today who behave better than some 30 and 40 year olds.
At some point, people forgot what they learned in kindergarten. Or more accurately, they were taught later in life that all that was bullshit. Being nice and quiet and generous and helpful and compromising will get you to the bottom of the pack in this concrete jungle. To be a “winner”, you have to be loud. Take what you deserve. Never surrender. Never back down. All these phrases stand in contradiction to what we’re told in kindergarten.
It’s no wonder we’re so confused. Our whole society has collapsed into a pile of doublethink.
Be yourself. Do as your told. Share your toys. Defend what's yours. You are special, you can be whatever you want to be, just as soon as you’ve completed the agreed upon rat-race.
It’s hard. Being yourself.
It usually starts off by being BY yourself. Standing separate from everyone else, trying something you’ve never seen anyone do. I think some people are frightened by this. Not of being themselves: I think most people are scared of that, at least in the beginning. I know I am.
No, I mean people being scared of other individuals being themselves. I’m reminded of that great quote by jack Nicholson in the movie “Born to be Wild”. He says; “People can talk about freedom all they want, but as soon as they see someone free they fear and hate them, because he reminds them of what they’re not.”
Because being yourself, being free, sounds much sexier than it is. I think ‘follywood’ has dressed it up as some leather-jacketed shotgun-wielding biker, driving around stopping rapes and bank-robberies wherever he goes.
But being yourself is not really like that.
Being yourself is wearing clothes you like even if the cool kids laugh at you.
It’s crying in a movie theater or going out to a restaurant alone.
It’s reading Harry Potter on the train with the kids’ cover.
When you think about it, the people who are most themselves are the outcasts. The nerds and geeks and generally uncool kids, who do what they want and dress how they like. Granted, sometimes they choose this hard ridiculed life for lack of social skills to show them another way. Nevertheless, they live a life truer to themselves than the jocks and cheerleaders.
Some of these metaphors are in very American terms, but the same applies everywhere in all strands of life. Go into any office, any work place, and you will find conformity and uniformity holding it together. It is a crucial ability of man, to conform. But some people aren’t meant to conform as much. The great people of history - Einstein, Tesla, Wittgenstein - were lacking in conformity. And where would they be with it? How can one possibly know her limitations if she doesn't push herself to the limit.
I try to live my life true to myself. Sometimes it leads to ridicule, sometimes it leads to encouragement, but if I do it right, it always leads to a strong feeling of conviction in my life and in myself. Part of me was and still is scared of changing my plans and ending my trip earlier than expected.
But I know these parts consist of fear, of facing all the people I've been telling about how long I'm going to travel for, for years. Fear of admitting I was wrong.
Because of this, I know that none of the above is a good enough reason to stay. Of course, it is much easier to change my plans when everyone I’ve told so far is as supportive as they have been. But I couldn’t have known this before I told them. I first had to face my fear, and only then was I shown that the fear existed only in my mind. And that the reward was so much greater than I had imagined. Like so many things in life, facing my fears proved to be worth it.
Like my first tattoo. My first piercing. My first Ayahuasca ceremony. Doing what was right for me, despite my fears of what other people would think, was the best thing I could have done.
I encourage you all to think about who you are, and about who you want to be.
I know I will.