Why Self-Compassion Is the Key to Being Our Authentic Selves

I grew up in a family where outward appearance and reputation were important. Brightness was only encouraged if it was within the limits of what was considered normal.

No one has ever clearly told me, "What other people think of you is more important than yourself," but that's what I learned to believe. It was my intention to be accepted by others, because I thought that only then was I worthy of love.

I spent most of my middle school years in high school pretending to be someone else. I used to say “crazy” to meet people around me.

I suspect that because of my limited acting ability, most people would realize that I was a fake and didn't want to be with me. This simply increased my hunger for confirmation and external acceptance.

At the age of 13, I attended my first self-improvement meeting.

It was an incredible experience for me, and while I was in the classroom, something inside of me emerged. Being in that position awakened my love for self-improvement, a love that has only grown over the last fifteen years.

For the next ten years, I spent more than 350 hours participating in personal development meetings, and in July 2009, I finally received a sincere answer that would change my life forever:

I became arrogant, selfish, self-righteous, arrogant, and judgmental.

The answer struck me like a ton of bricks. I was designed at the same time and totally shocked.

I was named because I knew that people felt sorry for me in those ways: I was modest enough to know all about the judgment of a cargo ship, and the little tolerance of people who “did it wrong” (not my own way). My condition was often cold and paralyzed, and I could easily insult people when I knew it would hurt.

I was shocked, for upon receiving that reply from someone I had met less than six hours earlier, I felt completely in danger. I didn’t know what to do with myself at that moment of total exposure.

The walls I had created to “protect” my own identity were only pressuring (or rather, pushing) everyone down. I finally decided to make a change. And that is how I began my journey to regain my true identity.

To say that it was a war would be an understatement. The little voice inside my head had gotten really good from convincing me of "facts" which were actually just ideas based on my false beliefs about reputation and acceptance.

Lying to me had become such an unwise process that bringing it to my mind every day was a struggle.

As soon as I got the answer, I kept “being real” in my mind for a few days at a time. But more often than not, my commitment to the truth may fade into decades of impersonation, and I often do not even see the change.

When I realized that I was being completely unreliable, every minute of every day, I would go into a frenzy and regret that I had failed.

My new awareness seemed like a game of loss: if I really made a living and went back to my old ways, I would go into beating mode; when I pretended to be right by being my old self pretending, I felt sick to my stomach about who I was pretending to be. I didn't know how to win that game.

I spent a few years riding a rollercoaster out of reality, going back to my old ways, beating myself up with it; it was exhausting. However I learned that self-improvement is not a change, it is a journey.

I could not just close my old ways and open up new ways of life.

Making lasting changes can take commitment, practice, and most importantly self-awareness.

Commitment meant real commitment, and I did it for someone other than myself. And getting used to it meant making sensible decisions to set my own self-reliance instead of sitting in the box I built for myself.

The piece of feeling was the most important because it determined whether I wanted to take it back, dust it off, give it something else.

If making a mistake I would end up hitting myself with it, then I would never have even tried it. But if making a mistake was met with a desire to learn, and then I moved closer to my new ways, it was much easier to do.

Throughout my journey to discover and live like myself, I have experienced moments of great joy and freedom, which have encouraged me to keep moving forward.

One of my most influential experiences in letting my own light shine came to an end in November 2013, when I shaved half of my head.

One of my friends shaved part of her head in mid-2013, and I liked the way it looked. I thought it was the perfect combination of sexy and hard. I just wanted to shave my head, but I hesitated eziyis for six months.

I thought, “What would other people think if they saw you? Everyone will judge you. People will think you are weird. ”

The little voice in my head was crazy. My head and my heart did not come to an agreement because that little voice repeated the phrases I had heard all my life.

But one day - and I do not remember exactly when - I just decided to do it. I knew in my heart that I wanted to, so I refused to let that little voice leave me. If people would have thought that being my own person was a "strange" thing it would be!