Criticism of "Being Yourself"

Photo by Milan Popovic on Unsplash

Born in a typical middle-class Indian family, like other girls, I was also judged in many categories - skin tone, weight, hair type, etc., and I swear it was challenging because I was always lacking an ideal girl aura. I wasn’t a tomboy either; the small difference was I just had my own style, and the bad thing was no one was there to guide me or teach me how to present my different self and still be respectful around people (respecting social norms, being yourself, and behaving like an idiot are all different things).

Yes, we judge people, and we are being judged at the same time.

And it all starts at your home, sometimes for being different or sometimes for just being your age. We always say this time won’t be back, just live your life the way we want, and when we do, we still face criticism (no one understands this type of criticism - criticism of being yourself). The example I want to give here is especially when it comes to my hair. Until I turned 22 and finally found out I always had beautiful curly hair, which needs a different type of maintenance than straight hair needs. But after maintaining it, my relatives still ask if I comb it or not.

As I grew older and entered my early adulthood, I often felt a sense of distance due to the choices I made in my life. The result was that I started hiding some part of me. I never knew writing was the form I would love the most when I am struggling to form my opinion about large things, which is spoken in public speaking or group discussions.

I started writing when my "Not Sure and Confusion Phase" was going on. For me, my emotions really matter - how I feel about a particular thing, “the gut,” as we call it most of the time. If I don’t have any gut feeling about it, I won’t say or give a decision about it. And I understood all this process just by writing, and no one knew about it. Sometimes things run smoothly when no one knows about them and they’re hidden from the world (even family).

Some people will think you are being unreasonable, some will judge you for your dressing and grooming, some will judge you for your academics, and some will give statements about how your looks and academics don’t match the score. But if you want to be yourself, you should be responsible for being alone in certain situations and not hate people, rather than just saying, "Why ME?" or "Why is the world cruel to me?"

And the most important generation is us, who are very social on social media platforms, and you have to be even if you don’t want to. Like me, as a camera-shy person, having a social media presence is one of the toughest things for me to do, but I am trying to work on it, and maybe someday my mother will be proud of me, as she is a social media person.

Henceforth, Criticism of being yourself is nothing but how people are responding to your personal choices that you are putting out in the world, and I want to say just keep going because finding your path is difficult, as Steve Jobs has said.

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

And I suppose the dot should be yours and not borrowed, taken, or copied, because it won’t fit in the line (the purpose of your life) and will require a lot of time to measure and adjust in your own pathway again. So, prevention is better than a cure.