About what it means to be yourself

“Magazines like to advise: be yourself,” my friend said and fell silent for a long time, resting her chin in her hand and looking out the window.

Loyalty to habits?

One lord was imprisoned in the Tower. For some sins before the crown, he should have been beheaded. But he continued to shave every morning. The jailers sneered at him and brought him shaving water so cold that the basin twitched with a thin crust of ice. And yet the high-born prisoner continued his hygienic procedures.

Now I don’t remember where this story came from. But I know for sure that she has been living with me since childhood. It was her that I remembered in response to the question that sounded after a long pause: “What does it mean, in essence, to be yourself?”

And the point here is not loyalty to your habits – although, of course, it is also in it. And in what? Maybe it’s that the person refuses to say to himself, “Now this doesn’t make sense.”

Not on the attitude of other people towards him, not on the future that he no longer has, he bases his meaning – but exclusively on what he does himself: by his actions he affirms his own meaning right up to the last minute of his being.

System of values

Act in accordance with your value system. Maintaining self-respect… It’s about action. But what does it mean to be? Show certain qualities that add up to what we can call our uniqueness?

It is easiest to give a comic example here – in Gogol’s “Dead Souls”: “Chichikov once again looked around the room and everything that was in it – everything was solid, clumsy to the highest degree and had some strange resemblance to the owner of the house himself : in the corner of the living room stood a pot-bellied walnut bureau on absurd four legs: a perfect bear. The table, the armchairs, the chairs—everything was of the most heavy and restless quality; in a word, every object, every chair seemed to say: I, too, Sobakevich! or: I also look a lot like Sobakevich!”

This, not particularly attractive to us, bear-like Mikhailo Semenych with his head that does not turn around his neck, it turns out that he succeeded so much in “being himself”, that he animated everything around with himself, communicated his features to the environment. If we put aside his unattractiveness and mentally substitute someone we like in his place, would we not find this ability charming and enviable?

Surely someone is already doing a thought experiment, asking himself the question: how much does what surrounds me reflect my essence?

Appearance and response

“He lost his temper”, “became not his own” – our language stores the knowledge that we can stop being ourselves. “Lost human form.” Yes, it happens to us. This is a purely human advantage. A dog cannot lose its dog form, a bird and a fish cannot.

What happens? Even our human appearance, which should seem to be a species property, is not something inalienable for us humans. We must cherish it, work on it, and improve in it. What can we say about the personal, the individual? It certainly cannot be taken from nature.

Maybe we should go through the world, choosing in it those things, objects and events that resonate in us, about which we can say: “this is me”?

Self-image

“I am someone else,” said the French poet Arthur Rambo. What did he mean? Your inconsistency with the ideal of yourself? Or the feeling with which some of us look in the mirror: there is a stranger, a stranger. Our image of ourselves does not always coincide (or even, probably, most often does not coincide) with how we look.

One of my acquaintances, a thin brown-eyed brown-haired woman with a short haircut, once admitted that, according to her inner sensation, she is a Virgo-warrior with a wheaten mane to the waist and a piercing look of blue eyes. And I recognized her in this image! It was not a portrait of her appearance, but of her character.

Getting to know yourself

Following the question “What does it mean to be yourself?” The question “Who am I, exactly?” pops up. Maybe that’s why so many people like psychological tests, from the most popular to scientific ones – they tell us something about themselves.

And we can exclaim: well, now it’s clear! Here I am – creative and artistic, adventurous. Or – reliable and accurate, a person you can rely on. It seems that we need outside tips, because we ourselves are not completely sure who we are.

As a rule, the first people who tell us about us are our parents. What a pity that they say “be a good girl” more often than “be yourself”. However, they can be understood, “a good girl” is a well-defined model of behavior, but what will their child do if you invite him to be himself? Unpredictable. And it is possible that it is dangerous. So growing up, we feel a vague danger in being ourselves. But it is also an eternal temptation.

What do I feel here and now?

It seems to me – and this is how I answered my friend – that the first step to being yourself is to ask yourself: “How do I feel right now?” Not “what should I feel?” and not “what do people usually feel in such a situation?”, but exactly: “What exactly do I feel right now, at this particular moment?” Moreover, in the next minute, feelings can change and everything will start all over again.

And sometimes it’s easier to start not even with feelings, but with sensations, with getting to know your physical nature. It’s warm and cool, the belt is too tight, the shoes are tight … or not tight, that’s good, you can feel how we lean on the ground with every step …

But what about that lord in the Tower? What did he feel? Hopelessness and despair? Pride and determination? Anger? Why, for example, did he not throw this basin against the wall, did not rush to choke the jailer? I do not know.

Hearing your feelings is only the first step. Then we have a choice whether to express them or not, and in what way. And we have yet to decide how this fits in with our value system. And how much our value system is really ours …

Although, perhaps the best answer to the question of what it means to be yourself was given by Frank Sinatra. He has such a song “I did it my way” (I did it my way). It’s worth listening to! Not only what he sings about, but how he sings. In my own way, yes.