Are we being the real us?

Finally, get back to writing! It's quite a long hiatus and I guess my hiatus days are all filled with nothing but laying on the bed, late-night eating and yep I guess I should end it before it goes draggy. Hahahahaha.

 

Anyway, before I start my unplanned hiatus, I asked my friends for some ideas to write. And, apparently. A friend of mine, W responded with her question which makes me begin to wonder about the same thing too. 

 

"How to know whether we are being ourselves or not?"

 

If I could separate the inner self of my body and communicate with it, I probably ask the same question. And, I think it might take a long time to finally come up with an answer. To begin with, I would say that no humans know us better than ourselves. Which in some ways, we are the one who knows what we really want or in other words, how we would like to appear as in this world. The expectation, the imagination of ourselves walking on the earth and even what kind of clothes that we would like to wear every day. 

Everyone is different in terms of everything. Well, maybe there's a bit of similarity between your preferences and my preferences but the differences are much bigger than that general preferences we are talking about. As in, we both might love spicy foods but maybe I hate to see chilies on my plate, but you love seeing chilies in your meal. That's the difference. Hence, to connect the dots to W's question above...

 

My little cents would be that if we are being ourselves, it means we are ready to;

 

“Check back our bucket lists, have we made it or not. If we haven’t, then why? What’s stopping us? Get the answers and rewrite our plans to achieve our goals.”

 

All the goals we set in our lives could be one of the indicators that can show us if we are being the real us or not. Why? It’s because we all have different goals in life. And, I'm repeating it, we are all different. People around us don't know our goals in life so how would they know if we're being ourselves or not. "What are my goals in this life?" This is a hard question that we need to ask ourselves. Flip back our diaries, go through our bucket lists again and see what we once set in our mind on how we would like to live our lives to the fullest. However, here I also would like to remind you that it doesn’t necessarily mean that we are a complete failure or totally not ourselves if some of the goals missed the targets. For example, I wish to become a doctor before, but now I'm on my way to become a teacher. That, that doesn't mean I'm not being myself (facepalm). This type of goal is likely depending on God's wills. We planned, but God plans are the best for us. We must believe that.

 

The goals I mentioned above are more on how we imagine ourselves as one day and if in present days, we are not like what we imagined, then we should reflect on what's stopping us from being one. Like before, I always imagine myself as a person who is calm and can manage my anger in a good way, but now I'm all the way too grumpy, too cranky, and too annoying. If it went like this then, I should ask myself what's stopping me from achieving that one goal of mine. As I dug further, I found myself trapped in dissatisfaction and unfair judgments that were made on myself, so it turned me into a person I never want to be. And, that could be a slap on my face as I realized, I have turned into a monster that is not myself. But then again, should I just let go of the goal I set and continue being the grumpy one? Nope! For that! We will call it as a negative change. And negative things should be flicked away from our soul. Hence, I should rewrite my plans in order to achieve the goals that I once set which is to become a calm person. Maybe, the plans could be like ‘I should tape my mouth when I want to vent out my anger. Or maybe I should walk away and do something I love to just let it slide.’ These might get you like “Em hello Nadia, will those work? Won’t it be worse? Suppressing anger could turn fatal.” But, nah, it’s okay. I know myself as someone who easily annoyed with someone who does things that against my logic or things that happened really in weird ways for me. So, maybe by practicing those I could teach myself to be calmer in some situations that I could not control. This literally like I smacked my head and say, “not everything goes along your favors, you freak!” (◡‿◡)

Ps, we are all different, and you know who you are so of course, you have better plans for yourself. ^^

 

“Reflect our life goals and question ourselves, are these goals really me? Are these goals really good for me? Or it just some delulus expectations?”

 

Sometimes when we set our goals, we tend to think highly of what the future holds. Well, we should believe in ourselves as Norman Vincent Peale, the author of The Power of Positive Thinking, once said, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.” I always heard people quoting this. And, by chance, I happened to know the name of the person who said these meaningful words when I was searching for it. Anyway, I am agreeing with what he said. We shall aim high and believe in ourselves. However, we all know that we all have our unique capabilities in something. Everyone is not a genius who knows everything right in his mind. Some people know what you don’t and it’s vice versa. There’s nothing wrong with setting big goals but being realistic is another thing we should keep in mind. Some people gave up on their dreams because they are too focusing on the big dreams that they set till they forgot the capability and the power that they actually hold on the other things that they good at.

 

Nevertheless, I was once in that situation too. I have so many dreams and goals that I want to achieve ever since I was in primary school. I want to explore a lot of fields, be it medical, psychology, engineering, software, and many more. But, hahaha. I woke myself up and told myself that, it’s never wrong to dream but I should know where my real capability lies on. So, here, am encouraging you guys to set your goals and ask yourself if the goals are good for you. Or is it just some expectations. I would like to highlight this part as nowadays we tend to get influenced by a lot of things, especially from social media. When we scrolled our timeline and we saw people that have something we don’t have, we tend to mark our goals to be like them. And, the mistake we made is when we expect ourselves to be like them and from here the insecurities hit us! Like I previously mentioned, there’s nothing wrong with setting your goals high but just remember your capability. It’s not like I’m saying no need to dream, you never gonna be like them. But here what I want to state is that, don’t push yourself too hard because only you, yourself know how you work things out.  The goals are not only on materials and how you imagine yourself living in a big mansion in the future. However, it also involves your goals on how you want to appear on earth. In a simpler way, you might look great when you use this product but maybe it could irritate my skin when I use it. Not everything is for everyone. And, expectations do kills because some things are not within our reach. :)

 

“Open up, be honest to yourself.”

 

Allow yourself to stop and ponder what is best for you. If you think it’s not, then it’s okay to change.

We all know if we do something against the borders. Like when we are in a country, we must follow the rules and laws. Same goes as in Islam, we have the Syaria’ that we obliged to follow. The guidelines that I believe all religions have lined out to the believers. The dos and the don’ts. Hence, don’t lie to yourself. Listen to your inner voice. Pay attention to the intuitions you have in your gut. We all know what’s right and wrong. If we are wrong, then how about we change the route on our ‘GPS’ so that we could achieve our life goals but in a better and safer path. For example, we would like to go to our dream palace, and it has many routes to reach there. One route filled with joy and funs, so we chose that. As we walked, we sensed that the route is filled with thorns and it’s hurting us. You realized it might risk our safety, but we lie to ourselves saying “It’s okay. The thorns are nothing compared to the joys along the route.” And as we continued, we realized that our body bleed more than we thought, and it makes us weaker. Try to imagine if we stop when we started to sense something is wrong with the route we took and make a calculation again. We can avoid the thorns by choosing other safer routes to reach the palace. The route might fill with boredom and no funs but remember, the real joys wait for us later when we reach the palace. So, never lie to yourself. Be true. Trust your intuitions and hunch.  We all make mistakes but the moment we realized our mistakes, embrace it, and come up with different ways to not repeating the same mistakes.

 

“Accept and stop dwelling in the past.”

 

This is a hard nut to crack. Accepting what we have done and experienced in the past is indeed never an easy thing to do in life. Sometimes we made a wrong choice and we regret it, or we happened to experience some ugly incidents that haunting us like ghosts in our nightmares. However, one thing we should know that when we dwell in the past, we are like pushing ourselves in the deep sea with a metal ball chained on our feet. It makes us harder to swim back to the land as the heavy metal ball pulled us deep down the sea. Close your eyes and imagine, what would you do if you were in that situation for real? Imagine the heavy metal ball chained to your feet as the past you chained to your mind. In order to save your lives, are you going to let the metal ball chained to your feet? Or are you going to muster all the courage and try to unchain the metal ball off your feet though little struggles are required to do so? Which one would you choose? If you chose the former one, man, I’m telling you. You are insane (facepalm). But if you chose the latter, then I would praise you for your courage. What’s worth more than a try, right? To be honest, I also have a problem with letting go of my past too, and that makes me insecure with everything in my life. So, what I mentioned above is for myself too. Maybe with some little courage, we can finally free from our past. Let’s start putting a stop to all the miseries, shall we? ^^

 

“Embrace your differences and flaws.”

 

We all need to keep this one in the back of our mine. We all have our beauties and flaws in some ways. Maybe I have flaws in something that you excel at. So, again, we are all different. By the time, we accept our flaws, that means we are closer to be our real selves. As no one is perfect in this world and even if you think someone is perfect, maybe that’s from your perspectives. And, by the time you start to compare yourself with others, that’s when you start to hate yourself. You start to hate yourself because of the flaws you have. That’s why, the world needs to normalize not to idolize something too much till it can lead us to question ourselves, “Why do I have flaws? Ugh.” The major standard is taken as if it is the big picture we must be. No biggie but I do believe that there’s nothing wrong with idolizing something if that could be a fire to ignite your spirit but it became all over the mess when you expect yourself to be exactly like them and when you start to downgrade yourself. That’s a no-no, okay.

 

“Shut your ears to negativity and insecurities thoughts.”

 

Have you ever heard your mind telling you that you are not good enough? Or maybe, it told you that you are totally below the standard. If we would like to know whether we are being ourselves or not, this could be other indicators too. The moment we can find a way to shut our ears to block those negativity and insecurities thoughts, that’s when we are being ourselves. Why? Because that means we are accepting ourselves the way we are. (Making this short as the how’s and why’s could be found in previous points.) ^^

 

“They hate me, but don’t worry, I love me!”

 

Keeping the best for the last one. Love yourself. You could put this as the top priority if you’re being asked what’s the reason behind all your efforts to get yourself back on track. When we love ourselves (in positive ways), it means, we truly love ourselves for being who we are. We accept the flaws we have, we accept our capabilities, and we accept our existence. It’s like when you love something, people might wonder why you love that but who cares, as long as you love it and that’s more than enough. In other perspectives. Initially, we all have the original state of ourselves. In deeper meaning, we all have our characters and personalities to begin our lives with. And, due to some other factors, we are influenced by some changes. Originally, we are strong and confident with being us, but, then insecurities hit. And, bam! Where have the strength and confidence gone to? :(

Originally, we are calm but then the past is haunting us, we became a person with too many grudges kept underneath our breath.  We began to question ourselves about everything that we do, and everything that we have. And when that happened people, we are likely to be said as, doubting. Doubting ourselves. We doubt our life choices, appearances, et cetera.

If we would like to be the real us then we should accept our life nature, our past, and our existence. We are all human beings; we are not superheroes that can change into other versions only by wearing costumes. To gather the courage and finally embrace the scars we have in our lives are not easy. The real key is never to give up on yourself. Never give up loving yourself. Give yourself time to deeply take a breath and exhale all the hurting miseries.  One day, you surely can face the world with confidence and smile.

 

 

All in all, I hope my points are clear enough to make you understand what I would like to deliver, huhu :’)

This one is so long, and I feel like writing my coursework hahaha.

Sorry for the lengthy writing. Take care and stay safe!

 

Much love, ❤