Closer To The Heart
New Member
I won't preface this with a whole lot of background information, but since it's my very first post I should explain that I am learning, I am improving myself, and after journalizing these thoughts today I felt they might make a decent post here for others to read, discuss, and critique:
On "Just Be Yourself"
Just be yourself. Act Natural. Be "genuine". How many aspiring young Don Juans have despaired at the ambiguity, the surface futility of this advice?
"But I am myself all the time," the AFC, my past self, laments.
"If the secret is just to 'be myself,' then surely I am lost, for I have always been myself, and myself is fat and lazy and cannot talk to women!"
Personally, in my naivety, I took "just be yourself" to mean "Don't pretend to be someone you're not," which is all well and good as far as advice goes, but I no longer feel it's the proper take-away from "just be yourself." It just doesn't fit the rest of the advice I've seen here on sosuave so far.
Some of you may be aware of conflicting truisms as a logical fallacy, ("A penny saved is a penny earned," but "nothing ventured nothing gained," for example) I think this is the same sort of incongruency "just be yourself" carries. Should I just be myself, or should I "fake it till I make it?" Should I do my best to act naturally, or should I focus more on "As I think, So I become?"
This sort of dawned on me as I was washing my dishes today. Cleaning off the grime and dried food from a plate, and thinking heavily on many of the lessons I've absorbed already from the bible, I began to think of myself as the plate. No one would eat off of this plate straight out of my sink, it was disgusting! But if I cleaned it well, no one would think twice about eating their meal off it. I could have **** on that plate, and no one who didn't see it happen would ever even know. It doesn't need special designs on the face of the plate, it doesn't need special peripherals to do it's job. It is simple and elegant once it's cleaned, efficient and not superfluous.
Consider the filth and old food in this analogy to be your personal flaws. It's the 5 pounds you need to lose that undermines your confidence, it's the haircut you're procrastinating about getting, it's the wrinkled old clothes you drape over yourself to go out, it's all the days you don't clean your teeth right and let them rot away and yellow. It's all those days you've smoked weed all day instead of doing one productive thing. It is NOT, however, the fancy car that you don't have, it is NOT the large sums of money you wish you were making, it is NOT the subjects you've no interest or knowledge in that might be useful to impress someone somewhere someday. People don't need all that **** to like you, they just need a well cleaned plate.
Like the plate, you don't need bells and whistles to be appealing and attractive. However, like you, the plate cannot fulfill your nature while crusted with old food and mold. The phrase should never be uttered "be yourself" again, but "be your BEST self," it's much more clear that way. And if it takes some scouring to get there, then so be it.
On "Just Be Yourself"
Just be yourself. Act Natural. Be "genuine". How many aspiring young Don Juans have despaired at the ambiguity, the surface futility of this advice?
"But I am myself all the time," the AFC, my past self, laments.
"If the secret is just to 'be myself,' then surely I am lost, for I have always been myself, and myself is fat and lazy and cannot talk to women!"
Personally, in my naivety, I took "just be yourself" to mean "Don't pretend to be someone you're not," which is all well and good as far as advice goes, but I no longer feel it's the proper take-away from "just be yourself." It just doesn't fit the rest of the advice I've seen here on sosuave so far.
Some of you may be aware of conflicting truisms as a logical fallacy, ("A penny saved is a penny earned," but "nothing ventured nothing gained," for example) I think this is the same sort of incongruency "just be yourself" carries. Should I just be myself, or should I "fake it till I make it?" Should I do my best to act naturally, or should I focus more on "As I think, So I become?"
This sort of dawned on me as I was washing my dishes today. Cleaning off the grime and dried food from a plate, and thinking heavily on many of the lessons I've absorbed already from the bible, I began to think of myself as the plate. No one would eat off of this plate straight out of my sink, it was disgusting! But if I cleaned it well, no one would think twice about eating their meal off it. I could have **** on that plate, and no one who didn't see it happen would ever even know. It doesn't need special designs on the face of the plate, it doesn't need special peripherals to do it's job. It is simple and elegant once it's cleaned, efficient and not superfluous.
Consider the filth and old food in this analogy to be your personal flaws. It's the 5 pounds you need to lose that undermines your confidence, it's the haircut you're procrastinating about getting, it's the wrinkled old clothes you drape over yourself to go out, it's all the days you don't clean your teeth right and let them rot away and yellow. It's all those days you've smoked weed all day instead of doing one productive thing. It is NOT, however, the fancy car that you don't have, it is NOT the large sums of money you wish you were making, it is NOT the subjects you've no interest or knowledge in that might be useful to impress someone somewhere someday. People don't need all that **** to like you, they just need a well cleaned plate.
Like the plate, you don't need bells and whistles to be appealing and attractive. However, like you, the plate cannot fulfill your nature while crusted with old food and mold. The phrase should never be uttered "be yourself" again, but "be your BEST self," it's much more clear that way. And if it takes some scouring to get there, then so be it.
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