Dare to be different from all the rest: be yourself

You are one of a kind. All you need to do to be different, to stand out in a crowd, is to be yourself.

This works even better if you can love who you are, and own your image of yourself. ‘But who am I?’ you may well ask, "can I really be myself?".

It’s your job to find out who you are. Along the way, others will attempt to help you, by telling you who they think you are. Most of them don’t really know who you are, they know who they want you to be.

It isn’t up to others to tell you who you are, because nobody knows you better than you know yourself. Some of them can see you better than you can presently see yourself, because they aren’t judging you the way you are. Others can see you only through their own filters, so they’re not able to help you see through yours.

If you can learn to see yourself without all that judgment, you will see yourself more clearly.

You may have been under an illusion. This illusion says that who you naturally are isn’t good enough somehow, and that you need to change yourself into somebody else, and to become like the others. Only then will you be considered a success.

If you can be safe enough to become disillusioned for a time, you can find the time and space to see yourself as you are. The next step is deciding to be yourself.

If you can allow yourself to be in a place where it doesn’t make sense, where you don’t know, where you don’t have to explain anything to anybody, you might find what you’re looking for. You could find that being different, which is simply you deciding to be yourself, is a miraculous place to be.

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

• ©Kris Cahill
  ‘Being different is totally OK’ ©Riza Nugraha on Flickr