Taken

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” -- Oscar Wilde, author.

At one point during my childhood, my batchmates were giving me unsolicited advice, telling me to “be myself.”    It was my fault actually.  I didn’t have any good friends that time and in my desire to be accepted, I asked them to tell me what I could do to please them.  I can’t remember how I asked that but it seemed that I had so and so I got a lot of “advice” -- from different people who not all I like.

It was when I  stopped “following” their advice when I started to explore who I really was.  Was I really not being myself when I do this or that?   When I do this, they tell me to be myself…  But what if I’m really being myself when I do this?  And so I did it still… I experimented on the different things that they tell me which was not me.  I just did what I wanted to do and ended up liking some things and not liking other things.  The things I don’t like, I discard.

In psychology, they say that there are different ways of knowing yourself:  by looking at how you see yourself and looking at how others see you.  I have a very simple reaction to that really.  Mostly who you are is how you see yourself.  How others others see you only matters if you like what they see in you.  If you don’t like what they see, you simply disregard it.