Personal Discovery: Change your Relationship with Self Part 1

“Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.” – Oscar Wilde

Through these last few sections, we have hopefully come to a greater understanding of ourselves. However, we may know ourselves but still not accept ourselves. We want to be like someone else or just have different qualities. In order to be a better person, however, may simply becoming more of yourself. We are unique, a mix of genes, environment, socioeconomic factors, our place in history, and our souls. There is no one like us. Even identical twins have different personalities, different ways of looking at something. Cats that are cloned can end up being differently colored. There is no replication of the whole package of us. How priceless is it to be 100% unique in the whole world, in the whole of human history, never to be replicated, never to be found anywhere ever again? Still, we find ourselves unsatisfied, longing to obtain certain qualities or characteristics that we feel will give us greater acceptance or greater love.

Yet, who can love you as much as you yourself can? Am I saying to be egotistical or self-serving? To think you are better than everyone else? No. Self-love and self-centeredness are very different. Everyone has their good and bad qualities, their varying strengths and weaknesses. To think we are a better person compared to others based solely on a few qualities, especially qualities that we have little control over, is incorrect. Loving ourselves does not give us free rein to subjugate others or to hate others for not being us. Loving ourselves means to accept ourselves for the person we are and love our own unique qualities for what they are. Loving ourselves is a relationship we enjoy with ourselves and has nothing to do with others.

To love ourselves, we need to know our own personal identity, the identity that isn’t dependent on anyone else. Imagine you are in a deserted island with no one around. No one knows your name. No one will expect anything of you. No one will care what you say or what you do or what you feel or what you want. Who are you in that moment? What kind of person are you? That is your true personal identity. That is what you want to change if you indeed want to change it. If you want to change yourself, it should only be to better yourself and to accept yourself more fully, with or without the need for acceptance from others. This identity is the one we have to come to terms with, the one we need to learn to accept and all that comes with it, its good and bad and strengths and weaknesses. Once we accept ourselves fully, we learn to love ourselves fully and this is the love, which we in turn must learn to give out to others. There is a fine line between wanting to change and still being at peace with the person you are and wanting change because you are displeased with yourself.

“To wish you were someone else is to waste the person you are.” – Kurt Cobain

We can only change by understanding what truly needs to be changed and what doesn’t, what can be changed and what can’t, and to be at peace with the difference.

God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.

[Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr]

Once we figure out what can be changed and what needs to be changed, we have to look at where it came from in the first place. In order to uproot a behavior or a way of thinking, we need to find the main root or foundation. You can pull out everything else but if you fail to pull the main root, not only will it come back, it may come back stronger. We need to come to an understanding of the reasons behind something because that is what needs to be changed before the actual behavior or way of thinking can be changed.

This is where self-reflection comes in again. Like we discussed previously, everything that happens has a cause. We must find that cause and figure out where it comes from. Not only that, but we need to understand what part of us chooses to make the decision of certain behaviors. Even if we are not conscious of it, there is always something that actively chooses to go ahead with an action and always a reason behind that choice. To find that reason, to find what pushes us forward towards that behavior is to find out what to focus our attention on.