Act on Authenticity

“When we hold back, we feel less alive and less engaged. Life loses its color, excitement, and promise.”

Any good motivator or self-help author will tell you that life is better when you embrace it with authenticity. We should not refrain from being ourselves, from speaking freely with discernment, and breaking through fears to accomplish our goals. But we often underestimate the negative influence that results from holding back and choosing to live a boxed in life. Of course, it is powerful to be yourself, and that freedom is something I hope we all experience in our lives. But when we do not do that, we shrink. We shrink into a tinier space of what it means for us to be a human being, because we are constantly telling ourselves no. Each time we avoid ourselves, we get smaller and smaller, and we may even tell ourselves that we are doing it for a good purpose. “I was just trying to be kind” or “I was making sure I was professional.” At the surface, these seem like valid reasons to hold back, but they’re not. It’s a bunch of garbage you tell yourself to avoid living up to your potential. This is not to say that we should never have a limit or censor how we act, rather, that most of us bar ourselves from being our true selves. We are too concerned with what people think, what people might think, or what could happen as a result of our fears coming to light. As the author says, we can lose the engagement that makes life meaningful. We do not have the same vigor and excitement because we have shrunk into a hole that limits ourselves. So what does this mean? It means we all have work to do. Specifically, it means we must all take steps to live out who we are in unison with ourselves, that we may hardly be different in each category of our lives. The step forward might look different for you than it does for me, but no matter the step you simply need to move in the right direction. Just as resentment builds up, so does authenticity. Practice being yourself, and soon enough you’ll find you don’t have to tell yourself to be that way.

*Quote from Dr. Aziz Gazipura