Just be yourself.
I wish people who said that understood how hard that can be. What is the ‘self’ anyway except a construct? Except a jumbled flood of experiences filtered through our water/flesh sacks and a brain we don’t ever fully understand the functionings of? My ‘self’ is a constantly evolving being. Some of this is almost imperceptible, some of it is conscious choosing – what is ‘organic’ growth and why do we expect it of anyone when the education system and our cultural structures don’t support that?
Much of my life has been about learning what I’m not, or even what I’m not anymore – as well as the things I no longer want to be. When we’re in transition phases, this shape-shifting might ring false for other people as all they see is the jumble, all they experience is the sands rolling and whipping within you and that might well scare the shit out of them if their personality is permanently hammered into a rockface that you’ve now decided to inhabit for a short time.
I applaud anyone who has remained the same since their eighteenth birthday – that’s a Herculean feat, and not one I plan to undertake. Because while for some the Self is as fixed as the north and south poles, others are the weather systems responding to the heat and pressures around them, they are rainfall and storm-clouds patterning across the sky, flooding rivers and freezing fog; and I don’t think either way of being is better than the other, they’re just different approaches to answering the impossible question of who we are, of what ‘I’ actually means.
? of me swimming in the Dordogne last summer by @andyrgarside ??? #traveller #radicalselfacceptance #rewildyourlife
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