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We Can All Play Dress Up But What Does that Prove

By Chandler - 12/24/2014

Be who you are, not who the world wants you to be.

We get so caught up in what everyone else expects from us, that we tend to forget ourselves. We follow fashion trends because someone else said they were so. We get caught up in the latest eating craze. We listen to new music because someone said our old favorites are overplayed. We change when the world says to.

Learning to listen to your heart is actually a very hard thing. We believe what others tell us. We learn to put our own self on a shelf. We learn to hide our own thoughts and opinions; we replace them with the opinions of others. The reason I believe it is so hard to undo this, because we learned it so early. We don't even realize that we have forgotten ourselves and replaced them with carbon copies of what the world expects from us.


I'm not perfect and I don't have all the answers. But I am learning that I was not made to be someone else; I am here to be myself.

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

The skeleton of this post was written around Halloween. A time when dressing up in costume is acceptable. But really, our society as accepted a different sort of costume as part of every day life. We hear all about the politicians who lie and portray "two-faced" lives. But what about the quiet people who are doing the same thing.
Deep down, I believe that everyone wants to be accepted. So they bury a part of themselves that they feel is unacceptable to the general public. And since we aren't politicians, our secrets don't usually get uncovered.

But those secrets make up who you really are. So you stay up late and write stories that no one ever gets to read. Why? Because you are afraid of rejection. You are afraid that someone will tell you that you can't make a living based on your silly, little writing.
People come into our lives and tell us that hobbies are great. But at the end of the day, they usually aren't more than just hobbies.

I think that confuses us.
"You don't know what you want! You're so busy trying to be what everyone else wants you to be, you don't know who you are." -- from What's Your Number (words of wisdom tend to come to me from chick flicks)

 I think that is time to put ourselves first. At least for me, it is time that I put myself first. I have listened to people for years. Sometimes about little things and sometimes about big things. One of the first things I did for myself was move to North Carolina. It has been a rough few months, but I wouldn't trade any of it for the world.

North Carolina provided me a new slate to paint; where will you find yours?


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