“You can’t be somebody you’re not”
“Just be yourself”
These are both phrases that I have heard multiple times throughout my life. In movies, TV, and classrooms these are fairly common themes that are typically given a positive spin. A classic example is the scenario where a “socially challenged” student tries to impress a girl by doing various things outside of his normal routine. In the end he wins her over by just “being himself.” The morale of that story is to just be yourself and everything will work out in the end.
Here’s my question: Why?
Without delving too deep into exactly what is “self” and how each of us is really defined as a person, I’d like to just probe into this common theme a little bit. To start with, it would seem to me that by always being “yourself” you would remain in a static state of personality. I would argue that people grow and change (for better or worse) by doing things outside of their normal routine or set of actions. So in a sense you can only grow as a person by not being yourself until not being yourself becomes part of your self… Yeah that sentence sucked but hopefully you get my point.
Let’s look at a few other phrases that might pop up at certain points:
“You’re just not our type”
“You’re annoying”
“Why do you always have to be such a dick?”
Now if any of those statements were made in your direction, you could respond with “But I’m just being myself” and everything would be OK, right? Obviously not (in the majority of cases). So there you either have two options: to change your habits and personality to better fit in or please the other person, or don’t change and settle with the results.
So say you’ve decided to try to change your personality or whatever to better please the type of people making the three previous comments. This may have unintentional consequences. First, you may begin to displease people that were happy with the way your personality currently is. Second, you may just end up looking like a poser or trying way to hard. (Too bad there is no way to regression test your personality against cases like this…)
I’ve never been a big fan of trying to “fit in” or of fitting into a mold. However the point I am trying to haphazardly get across in this post is that change isn’t always a bad thing. It’s how people grow. Don’t be “yourself” all the time. Try being somebody else for a day. See what happens, see what you can learn and take away from the experience to improve your own lifestyle and how you interact with other people.