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People say, be who you are! But WTF does that mean?
How do I know how to be who I am if I don’t know who I am?
To be who you are is not to to be who you were yesterday or any other day, but to be who you are today. To be who you truly are today means that you embrace your ever evolving self – that you accept the ever changing you.
To be who you are is to be who you are becoming.
Think of the word authenticity. It’s root is the word author. To author is to create. Authenticity is a continual form of creation.
If you are being who you have been – being who I call your yesterself which is who you were yesterday – then that is NOT authentic…that is you being consistent.
John, You are 30 years old, why are you dressed like a teenager? Because its who I AM. No it isn’t you dumb ass. It’s who you were..15 years ago.
You don’t want to be consistent. Rocks are consistent…at least for a human lifetime. You are not a rock. That is you not changing. Not evolving. When you are who you were yesterday, exactly the same, you are actually resisting your authenticity.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. – ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ – Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Self Reliance’
Don’t be your yesterself. Don’t be a rock. That’s not authentic. That’s not real. Stop doing that.
Instead be who you are becoming. This is how you be who you are – by being who you are becoming.
But what does that mean? It means to act in that new way below the surface of your fears. That thing you fear to say, fear to do, that is the change you resist.
And when you succumb to that fear, when you aren’t vulnerable, when you aren’t strong and you limit the expression of your heart’s desire, when you stifle your intuitive impulse – you are being consistent instead of real.
And you can feel that afterwards. You always can.
“I should have said this.”
“I should have done that.”
“Oops. Instead I was a consistent rock. A consistent, dead, never-changing, never-evolving, inauthentic piece of volcano shite.”
W. T. F.
Why does everyone want to be so goddamn consistent?!
Because it is fucking SCARY to change! If I change, I might not get what I want or even worse, I might lose what I have!
Aaawwwwwwwww…..
I might not get the job. I might not make the sale. She might not like me. He might leave me.
What if when you die, if you were authentic in life you go to heaven and if you were not you get turned into a rock. Picture all those rocks along the sea shore with salt water lapping up against them for thousands of years are all the souls of the those people who were too scared to be who the were becoming. Ice cold fishy salty water just lapping up there against your face…the hot sun beating down on your bald grey head. You deserve it you consistent son of a bitch.
And how do I know this, you ask? Where did I discover the depth of truth here? How did I uncover this worlds wisdom?
Because, I, my friend have an arguably unhealthy addiction to change AND it scares the shit out of me to lose what I have, mostly in the form of love of others. So I’m constantly banging up against this thing. Getting a hard-on for change and then 1 billion butterflies fly straight down my throat and into my gut whenever I face the thing.
But I’ve learned to see the butterflies coming. Here they come, you over-appreciated insects, I see you. As soon as a few of them start down my throat and I start to feel them down there, it’s like BAM BAM…signal straight to my brain that there is some change here I am afraid of. There is me wanting to say or do something that I’m not saying or doing.
Those butterflies are like an inauthenticity alarm system.
The only way to get them out of there and to stop the rest from coming is to just say the thing, to do the thing. So I do it quick, like pulling the bandaid off. And I have hairy arms.
And then SNAP, DING! Truth spoken. Truth acted on. Butterflies gone. Free. Authentic. Real. Inconsistent. Not a rock. Not going to spend eternity with cold salty fishy water lapping up against my face.
Stop NOT being who you are.
Be authentic.
Be who you are becoming.
