Never Forget Who You Are

We all want to be accepted so we become someone else:

We all have been there. We all want many things in our life, but there’s one thing that’s actually has a different story to it. And that is wanting validation from society. We all want to be accepted/validated/approved of who we are. Though we want to be our own human being without any hold backs or anyone holding us down from our true potential; but society takes a grab on us that we find ourselves being so blind to.

It actually turns us into someone we are not. Someone complete opposite of who we were before or who we want to become. How do we catch ourselves in this trap?

Whether we choose to be ourselves or be exactly what society wants us to be, they still judge us regardless of what we choose.

We want to be accepted as a real person in our society, we do whatever we have to do and become in order to gain it. Something that we read from the wrong side of the light. We see the dark side instead of the lighter side. And it gets ugly and which makes us ugly regardless of how badly we want this one particular thing that we want: validation.

We all want it badly enough, we eventually become too blind to realize how deep down we are in this hole we basically pushed ourselves into from the beginning. It then blinds us of all that we created of our old self and which also robs us of it all and replaces it with all that society wants to see in us. Many of us relate to what I’m about to dig deep enough into next.

Which is the stories where we relate on the deep or even deepest level any human could ever possibly relate with. Bullies, cyberbullies. We all have experienced some amount of bullying either being the victim or the friend of the victim. Other relatable stories aren’t particularly about bullies and cyberbullies but more deep inside. It’s inside us, we are the monster, the demon we suffer and live with: mental illness.

Society can be so ignorant, blind and stubborn to what they aren’t seeing or realizing. They need to ask and educate themselves on the mental illness subject. Watch videos on YouTube, goggle important terms, visit the library, ask those you know and love who suffer and live with mental illness. When it comes to living with mental illness, it may feel or seem like it’s only something bad and nothing good could come out of our experiences with it.

But when we open our eyes, ears and minds a little more, we give ourselves the opportunity to improve our knowledge, education on what we don’t know for those of us who are trying/struggling to support someone we know and love that lives with mental illness. And also for those who live with mental illness themselves, it can seem impossible to find something good about this whole experience.

Believe me with what I’m about to share next. Living with mental illness may be another challenging thing to balance with all else that we are trying to balance in our lives already. And I had wondered how there could be any positive benefits of living with mental illness myself. At a certain point into my mental health recovery with my depression, it came to me.

Putting aside all that mental illness puts us through along with the stigma around it, we can benefit from these mental conditions in a great and empowering way. With all that I’ve accomplished with my brain in recovery, I’ve gained so much more clarity, inner strength, self control, confidence, happiness, hope, knowledge, experience, education and much more. My recovery with depression has also helped me see what wasn’t fully clear to me over the years of my past life.

Things and by that I mean, problems and mental health issues that I had and that have been going on and affecting my relationships with my family (parents & sister) finally became clear to me. Some issues already were clear to me, but the rest didn’t become clear to me until a certain point in my recovery. And that is another thing that I’m grateful to have the opportunity to fix what’s been broken and unresolved.

Since then, I started working on the parts of the problem that I could change myself on my own and the rest on the other side with my parents and sister; well I’ll admit that I’ve had my fair share of struggles with. Moments where I wasn’t being fully mindful and would’ve gone better if I was able to remind myself that I “cannot” demand or force them to change. I can “only” inspire change, it’s all up to them to take the inspiration and advice.

Anyway, back to the reasons or things that we can benefit with depression. Though when I say ‘with depression’ I don’t mean or intend to exclude the other mental illnesses and addictions. Living with mental illness can have many great benefits which has been clear to me for over a year now. The things you learn and gain while recovering with mental illness/addiction can really amaze you gradually as it’s happening (when you begin to become aware and realize what you can learn with each piece of knowledge from your experiences).

Now I’m gonna bring our attention back to the other subtopic of this article. People who have experiences with being bullied and cyber-bullied, can cause them enough issues for themselves. If they haven’t already had insecurities, this kind of experience will make them insecure, and for sure lead to mental health issues, mental illnesses, eating disorders and addictions with both substance abuse, gambling and others to help cope/feel something or get away from everything. Though when it comes to bullies, they do so because they are jealous of something great that we have, so they want to take it away from you, and knock you down with it.

They are just jealous of our highs. So they can just knock you down. – Selena Gomez

Back to going into deep detail about how hard it actually is to be ourselves when our want and need to have that “validation” from others becomes so much stronger. We want this something so badly that we are willing to risk more than we our real selves would never consider taking, just for something that actually doesn’t and shouldn’t matter as much as it actually does to us.

This never ends, it stays and follows with us wherever we go. It reminds us of how ugly we are and that we aren’t worry of anyone’s attention nor belong on earth even. It can really get to our heads if we give it the power to. But there’s a great fix to this. And by fix, I mean solution that really takes everything you’ve got, to succeed.

If you really want to be free, at peace with yourself and with society, I’m gonna give you a heads up, you are gonna feel uncomfortable (which comes with committing to improving yourself) and taking the right and necessary risks. Remember that lyric from Camp Rock 2’s music video for: Can’t Back Down: “with every big decision, comes an equally important share of the risk.”?

You are also gonna feel and believe that it’s so selfish to do this but trust me, don’t listen to that voice, listen to your real voice, your heart, your brain has been hijacked into believing the wrong facts. But it will take everything and time to retrain your brain and that will change your life forever! It will change your outlook on life and society!

To start on the journey of being free from all this, you gotta start focusing more on what you want, and to successfully focus and succeed in doing this, meditation can really help you. Meditation will help you start working on forming a better habit of focusing on the right stuff and mindfully! It will also help you practice inner peace, it takes time, don’t beat yourself up if you screw up or take longer than others to succeed. Don’t compare your chapter one to someone else’s chapter 20! The rest will will be covered in my next article in continuation of where I’ve left off here!