When being yourself doesn’t work, either one of two things is going to happen:
- You stop being yourself.
- You stop trying so hard.
I can’t speak for being liked or getting a certain job or making more money or impressing a girl, but for your happiness, only one of the two ever works.
When I was in 5th grade, the trend curve peaked. Never before and never after was it so “important” to be cool.
While I lucked out with some trends, like Beyblades, with shoes I wasn’t so lucky.
To this day, I think my friend Ted was the only one skateboarding, but for some reason, we all needed to have the shoes skateboarders would wear. Maybe it was this guy’s fault:
For months I cried and begged and moaned and complained until finally, my Mom let me get a $200 pair of shoes.
They looked like this:
Two-freakin-hundred dollars. For shoes. For an 11-year-old! I even feel stupid writing it.
Especially because I was already at size 40. I probably looked like a total goof.
Of course nothing really changed, no matter how proudly I wore them, except for the first day maybe.
“Oh wooow, nice shoes Nik, cool!”
“You finally got a pair, awesome!”
“Nice choice, congrats!”
…aaaand we were back to normal. Wow, thanks a lot, hedonic treadmill.
But it made perfect sense.
- I was still wearing glasses.
- I still had good grades.
- I was still a nerd.
I just had stopped being myself for a second. And all it had done was set me back $200.
Early in the spring term of my second semester in the states, I thought I’d give waking up early a try. In the depth of winter, I woke up at 5 AM, read The Alchemist and watched the sunrise.
My roommates didn’t understand. They were mostly partying. Of course it’s hard to get up at 5 when you do shots in the living room at 2.
When they asked why I did it, I never had a really good response. Most of them felt like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So they too shrugged and we all went our ways. But I felt good. I was doing something for myself. Doing what I wanted to do, no matter what people thought.
I just let myself be myself, without trying so hard to make who I was work for everyone else.
Wherever you are and whatever community you’re a part of, you have a choice.
You can be the 11-year-old, who gets a $200 pair of shoes, just because everyone else has them, or you can be the weird 22-year-old college student, who gets up at 5 AM to read.
Don’t stop being yourself. Stop trying so hard. You don’t owe anyone an explanation. For anything.
Being understood is a choice. But so is being yourself. Sometimes, the two exclude each other.
When that happens, the question is do we have the guts to choose the one that’ll really make us happy?
