I don’t mind facing resistance as long as I can be myself
Everybody out there is trying to tell you what you should do. They try to tell you who you should be, how you should behave, what you should think about.
And, if you are not like others, then you are different. You are an outcast. This is what I feel sometimes. It happens when I try to think with my own thoughts, when I dare to challenge the status quo. In all these situations, I face resistance. It is a natural process, I guess.
Sometimes resistance comes in terms of criticism. Some people are not able to understand you, they tell you that what you are doing is wrong, that you are heading nowhere, but toward failure. It happened to me many times.
I grew up in a very small countryside village, where people are expected to learn a profession and to start working. As a consequence, many criticized me and my family when I decided to enroll to a “scientific” high school, instead of a “professional” one. Some came to the point of stating that I was wasting my time. They saw my high school degree as a worthless piece of paper. Still, taking such a decision was totally empowering. Getting in touch with people with a different background made me change the way I saw life and my future possibilities.
The biggest resistance we have to face, anyway, is the internal one. It is that little voice inside yourself that keeps telling you: “Don’t do that! It will make you suffer”. “Why should you leave your certainties to go through unexplored lands?”. “Do not be fool, who do you think you are?”
We have to be honest. Facing the internal resistance is terribly hard. In some moments, we literally see “our demons”. The only way through is fighting, but it is never easy. We, as human beings, were programmed not to deal with discomfort, but to escape it. Comfort is what we ultimately seek and, oftentimes, this keeps us stuck where we are.
In June 2015 I was working as an intern in an international company, 20 km from my hometown in Italy. Then I received an offer to move back to Denmark (where I did my MSc thesis) in order to pursue an industrial PhD. The job was much better aligned with my passions, the salary was higher, and I already knew some people living in Denmark. Still, taking a final decision was extremely hard. I was scared of what people might think about me. I did not want them to misinterpret my decision as a sign that I did not care about my family. And, ultimately, I knew that going would have meant going through pain and discomfort. Change is never easy. At the end I found the courage and I do not regret it.
What I have concluded so far is that some degree of pain is necessary. Getting what we want is not easy. It is hard. The crucial point, although, is to understand what we truly want. To define what is worth fighting for. No matter where you head to, you will not avoid suffering. It is therefore worth heading toward where we want to go, to strive in order to become the person we would like to be, rather than following the crowd and become what others would like you to be.
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” — Lewis Carroll
I believe that comfort is the main reason why so many follow the “predefined path”. When you do as you are told to, and you define success according to society’s standards, you get rid of half of your worries. It is like sailing on a boat down a river, you have to keep it going, but the direction is clear. You do not need to question yourself about where you are going. You just need to make sure not to sink.
Instead, when you decide to be the master of your life, you sail in the middle of the ocean. There are countless direction you can pick. If you are not wise enough, you can end up taking the wrong path. If you are not brave enough, you can end up remaining where you are. Still, if you dare to make decisions and you are ready to adjust your direction along the way, you might have the chance to experience and see places others cannot even imagine.
“Never surrender your hopes and dreams to the fateful limitations others have placed on their own lives” — Anthon St. Maarten
Taking full responsibility for one’s life and getting over society’s expectations does not necessarily mean that we have to go against what we are told, nor that we should see ourselves as a “superhuman”, who does not have to follow rules and can do whatever he feels like. On the contrary, it means understanding that we can set our own standards, that we have the possibility to define our own path. By realizing that no one but ourselves can define what is worth spending our time on, we can finally start to take small tiny steps toward what makes us happy, toward what is truly important to us. There is no need for any drastic change, small and steady steps toward the right direction are all we need.
Last November I had a very busy time at work and I was getting increasingly upset: my working days were filled by “must do task” rather than important ones. Given this situation, I decided to devote the first two hours in the morning working on things I believed to be important. It might sound like a small and insignificant decision, but it made a huge difference. First of all, I stopped feeling miserable. At the end of every day, I had the feeling that I had made some progress. Secondly, those activities that I carried out in the mornings turned out to be the foundation of the work I will have later presented in a conference at the beginning of July. Putting important things first usually pays-off.
Ultimately, the challenge is to accept being different. What works for others does not necessarily work for us. What is important to us is not necessarily important to those around us. When we get to this realization, we can finally understand that there is no perfect recipe, no guidebook to show us the way. The quest for self-discovery my sound scary, we might be tempted to follow the “predefined path”, still the rewards are worth the effort. At least, that is what I believe.

