By Marcia Hunter
BE YOU… Be Yourself… Just be yourself…plays through my mind like echoes of childhood nostalgia. As a child, it seemed so easy to do. Just Be myself.
And as I began to take on the mantra, of being myself I learned early on in grade school, that being myself was not easy to do if I wanted to fit in. So I did the opposite, as I tried to disguise myself in order to be part of a group. Just Be Yourself, as I tried to mask myself for boys to notice me, for popularity, for friendships, for relationships.
As I became older I started to take more of myself off, and put more of who I wasn’t on for the approval of other people. I did this for so long, that I really never gained a true self identity.
I hid who I really was so that people would like me, so that people would think a certain way about me, so that people would want to be around me (how controlling of me). Truth, is they still didn’t like me at times, and I didn’t always fit in, so that strategy didn’t work out for me. But I had done this for so long that as an adult, I didn’t know who I was. How can a person be authentic if they don’t even know who they are?
So now, here I am at 40, on a journey of self-discovery and I am learning a few new things:
1. Being me is being the best me, while still figuring out who I am. Sometimes the journey is not always comfortable, but knowing it is ok to be uncomfortable and necessary for growth: to be Challenged
2. To accept and acknowledge that not all days I have MY shit together, and knowing that it’s okay: to be Transparent.
3. TO cry sometimes, that I hurt sometimes, that I go through emotional rollercoasters rides sometimes, screaming with hands up: to be Courageous.
4. Knowing that in a world driven by social media madness, that I don’t define myself by false descriptors of what beautiful is, of what happiness is, of what love is. That I don’t place false value on the number of likes and views. That true value, and true worth is measured through my good deeds, is measured by how I made a difference to someone, how I handled a bad situation, and how I impacted others: to be Valuable
5 Being authentic is staying true to who I am and not giving a f_ck about what other people think, because in reality what they think is really none of my business anyway: to be Unapologetic
So to be Challenged, Transparent, Courageous, Valuable and Unapologetic, to me is being you authentically.
