I’m not being funny – it’s a question I was reflecting on recently. You see I was reading someone’s Facebook Page and someone had asked that person (who shall remain nameless) the exact same question. To which the reply had been – well, shall we say, not the whole truth.
You see many people on Facebook – or other social media – are living their public persona lives out in a certain way, which may not reflect the entire truth of their lives. Do you know what I mean?
Is anybody’s life ALL luxury travel, fancy cars, and perfect wives and children, perfect in-laws, perfect jobs or businesses, perfect pets, perfect friends?
I doubt it. Yes, you can have a great life, but I defy you to show me someone who has no challenges, who doesn’t occasionally say – or at least think – ‘oh shit. I could have done without that’. The problem with not being you – and I mean the WHOLE of you – is that people either don’t believe it – it doesn’t look authentic. Or they do believe it, which means they feel their own life is shit – because they can’t see how it is ever going to look like this friend’s life, or that celebrity’s life, or that YouTube influencers life.
And I see that problem a lot with young people. The pressure on them to live up to their ‘role models’ on social media is immense and unreal in this selfie generation where everyone looks perfect the whole time.
And I just want to say to them – you don’t HAVE TO BE anyone else. You only have to be you.
Well, here’s the thing, in a similar way many people reach a certain point in their life where they stop and think about who they actually are. Maybe they have had a life change, a divorce, a death of someone important, children leaving home, job change or relocation or redundancy. Many women reach one of these milestones and it makes them think.
The question of ‘what’s it really like to be you?’ is not one they can easily answer. Because they have spent their whole life being who someone else wanted them to be OR being what they THOUGHT someone else wanted them to be.
Case in point, the mother of a close friend. She only ever wanted to be a Mother and a Wife (in caps cos of the importance for her). She did both those things. But then when her husband died after her kids had all left home, she was left wondering what and who she was. She felt she had no identity – because the 2 roles she had played in her life were no longer required of her.
When my friend asked her what she wanted to do now with her life, she couldn’t answer, and she still can’t 12 years later. And that’s because this stuff is really hard to do on your own. It is amazingly difficult to get clarity on who you are and what you want when you are the object of your thought process.
Would you agree it is often really easy to see someone else’s strengths or someone else’s solutions – because you are not IN it? You are not clouded by all the programming you have picked up over the years. All the self-limiting beliefs, all the baggage.
But would you also agree that without clarity on who you are and what you want, you are only going to get more of the same, at best? At worst, it’s a downhill spiral. If you don’t know where you are going, and you don’t have a map to get there you just end up getting more and more lost and going round in circles. Suddenly it’s 5 or 10 or 12 years later and you are still in the same state of confusion, or grief, or dissatisfaction with your life?
Well, you don’t have to figure all this out on your own. Hop over to the Find Your Why Foundation and find out more about our monthly membership, where you can join a fellowship of other women in a secret Facebook group full of love, support and ideas. We keep membership to this group at a no-brainer cost (way less than a Costa a day – in fact probably less than a Costa a week (depending what you drink!), and definitely less than a bottle of wine a week.
Go have a look at it here. It might be the place where you can gain a bit of clarity, make some friends and move forwards on a new path. It might be the place where you can find out what it is REALLY like, to be YOU.