I read a few books over the weekend, which really added value to my life. After all, self-help books are the poor mans therapist, right?
Anyways, one of the books that I was reading (Risking, by Viscott) said the following, and I thought I would share it.
He explained, that the only if we are being true selves, and allowing people to accept us for our true selves, can we ever actually experience true self acceptance – and feel worthy of being our selves.
I am going to take a step back and apply this to myself, a little, and perhaps it will serve as a reminder to myself when I look back on this in the future, and a lesson to the rest of you.
For much of my life, and perhaps even now, I wanted nothing more than to be accepted by the world. The basic fallacy that I was living with, was that if the world knew who I was, they wouldn’t accept me, so I pretended to be someone else. Now in reality, the change between the “real Josh” and the “pretend Josh” wasn’t that great. However, in my mind, the result was that I never really found world-acceptance since they were only accepting the pretend Josh, and therefore never actually found self-acceptance.
However, once I was able to tell myself that I didn’t care what the world thought of me, and that I wasn’t going to show them a “pretend Josh” any more, I quickly found that no one stopped liking me, or dropped me as their friend, and my life kept going on as before. Well, this soon lead to self acceptance.
Which leads to the following irony: The path to self-acceptance is through not caring what anyone thinks about you AND realizing that people like you for who you are.