Don’t Be Yourself!

Ali Raza
2 min readDec 9, 2020

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Photo by Randy Fath on Unsplash

Humans love to classify themselves in us and them. Be it family, country, society, cult, or religion, in humans, there will always be some distinction like “us vs them” or “ours vs theirs” at some level.
These weird creatures won’t accept you as you are. The way you think, the way you socialize, the way you play your part in this game called life, and what you believe in decides whether they’ll consider you one of them or not.
There will always be someone giving you advice that you never asked for. There will always be someone creating hurdles in your way because they think something else(that you don’t actually want) is right for you.
Some old uncles will try to live their boomer dreams through you. Now some of you will say that elders want better for us, and I get it! But, bruh, it’s not always the case. Sometimes the things they want us to go after are just useless.

If you think don’t like everyone around you and you don’t believe in what they believe, it’s really hard to blend in with them.
You’ve to put on that mask of pretending to be one of them otherwise you’ll be left alone.

I think we overcomplicate our lives by worrying too much about things that we think are going to happen in the future but never happen. I’m overcoming this, or at least I’m trying. But, people around me are just different I guess, they won’t get it.

Sometimes I feel like no one will ever get me, sometimes there’s a part of me that never gets that sense of belonging.
I think it’s just that if you try to be yourself and present yourself with your unique (not better or worse just different) set of beliefs they’ll consider you alien, they’ll consider those beliefs alien.
Sometimes I try to convince myself that I’ve got the same set of beliefs as them but you know what? then, that feeling of not being yourself hits me, and, it’s a really sad feeling!

I’ve come to a conclusion though. It’s really simple. If you’ve got a different set of beliefs than them, then you’ve got two options:
Either you be that alien and go solo until you find that perfect person that you can get along with or you can just stop being yourself and boom, you’ll be a part of them.

To be honest, I’ve tried both options, being alone is cool but in the end, it gives panic attacks especially if you’re from South Asia and none of your ancestors has ever lived alone!
And on the other side, not being my true self makes me feel like a hypocrite. So, I guess, I’m still figuring this mess out.

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Ali Raza

Software developer // writer. Into philosophy, literature, and comp. science.