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“Live as yourself.” I see those words a lot.
But there are days when seeing them somehow wears me out.
What does it even mean, to be yourself?
I don’t really understand myself to begin with.
Me, in the meeting room
“Any thoughts?” I was asked, and for a moment I hesitated.
In truth, I thought it was a little off.
But I read the room and answered, “I think it’s fine.”
On the way home, I let out a sigh without quite knowing why.
It wasn’t as if I had lied.
But something, a little of something, felt as if it had disappeared.
Things like that pile up.
To be a “good partner”
It was on the way home from a date.
In truth, I was a little tired.
I wanted to go home early and spend the evening alone, quietly.
But I didn’t say so.
I didn’t want to disappoint them.
Somewhere along the way, fitting myself to the other person had become my normal.
Is it love, or am I losing myself — in some unguarded moment, I can no longer tell.
The night I opened social media
Someone is making a living doing what they love.
Someone who moved abroad.
Someone who quit their company and went out on their own.
Someone saying, “I made the choice that’s true to me.”
Amazing, I think.
And at the same time, something in me starts to hurry.
I feel I have nothing like that.
No strengths, no core, no personality to speak of —
I put the phone down and looked at the ceiling.
I no longer knew what I wanted to do
The self-analysis for a job search stopped me cold.
“What are your strengths?” “What kind of work do you want to do?” “Where do you want to be in ten years?”
I had never really thought about it.
All along, I had just been handling whatever was in front of me.
Living up to someone else’s expectations.
Before I noticed, my own outline had gone blurry.
Maybe
Maybe being yourself isn’t something you search for and find.
Maybe it lies not at the end of thinking, but at the end of choosing, again and again.
At the table, you alone decide
In pool, no one tells you what to do.
How to attack this layout.
Where to leave the cue ball for the next one.
Take the risk, or play it safe.
All of it, you decide.
Not the meeting room, not home, not social media — at the table, other people’s expectations and the world’s common sense don’t matter.
There is only what you want to do.
When it goes in, you’re glad.
When it misses, it stings.
Those feelings belonged to no one else. They were mine.
It’s all right to struggle
The answer to being yourself doesn’t come quickly.
At the table, you strike one ball on your own judgment.
It doesn’t have to go well.
As those shots pile up, the outline of yourself that had gone blurry sometimes comes, little by little, into view.
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