Benefits and Hardships of Living the life of your Authentic Self

I think that on my Instagram, I share a lot of advantages of being your true authentic self. Connecting to the person you are deep inside can help you figure out your life alignment in lifestyle, creative self-expression, and purpose-driven career.

But today, for the first time, I want to talk about and share some thoughts on the topic of following your authentic self and the hardships that sometimes come with that. Especially in case you are feeling it, to let you know that you are not alone in going through with that.

Everything in life is a choice. Being your authentic self is a choice too. And this choice is NOT made once in a lifetime. It is something we do every day.

Not sure if you can feel my sadness through me typing that, but I have to admit that there were times in my life where making that choice was incredibly difficult for me. Still, when I recall this time, I feel sadness. I feel how I lost time, resources and how with my own hands, I created a life that was slowly destroying me from the inside out.

Why do you think this happened to me and why does this happened to other people all the time?

Why do people willingly turn their lives to emotional, mental, and sometimes even physical prison?

I have some thought on that.

Firstly, they don’t know anything else. This is what trauma is - when we already as little kids learn to hide parts of ourselves that seem forbidden, shameful, wrong, or bad. We learn to fit into the family circles, societal circles, ideologies of our countries. And fitting in has nothing to do with thriving and being who you really are.

Secondly, because choosing yourself is not always easy. It comes at the cost of losing people, habits, things we got used to - we also lose the life that WE KNOW. It’s not necessarily fulfilling, but we know how to live like that so we do it. Losing that sometimes feels like losing the ground, the fundament of everything you’ve ever known. It feels like and might require breaking bonds with family, traditions, parental teachings, losing relationships with people we already connected with. It’s all like living in the box of things you have known, and sometimes even though we are deeply unsatisfied and unhappy within that box - LOSING feels like an even more unbearable thing to do.

You can be deeply unhappy and unsatisfied in the life that you willingly created just because you knew just one way of how to build it, but on the same way, you are not willing to make things in a different way. And I have to say that I’ve been there.

And I also have to say that it is an ongoing journey. Of course, it gets easier, but even still, sometimes I'm faced with a choice: me or the safety of a regular, normal job within the corporate world or system, me or keeping a connection to a person that makes me unhappy, me or communicating with a toxic relative.

It gets easier, it gets lighter, you do feel more detoxed from the conditioning of "must, should, have", and the more you practice, the easier it is and more fulfilling - I promise.

However, sometimes you may feel sad to make another decision on your way of choosing yourself. And it’s okay to feel sad, to process emotions, to grieve, because it’s okay to grieve when you’re losing something. Whether it is a connection to a person, dreams, idea, or anything else, especially if you spend years of your time and other resources investing in that.

But emotions are like the barrier, like those huge ocean waves that are bigger at the coast and when you overcome it - then there is an ocean of opportunities. We do get attached - to things, people, ideas, beliefs, even dreams, so parting with them could be a difficult thing to do, but when you do it - when you overcome the emotions and hold yourself in this struggle - so much can await you at the other end of that journey.

Freedom of being yourself, choices that are yours, small and big wins of making your life more and more yours and not somebody else's - totally worth it. But I wanted to support you in telling you - it is worth it to keep on going.

I make this choice every day. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s not, but what is important is to keep on going, to know your direction, so you can find your true north, which means you true destination -

In life, in career, in relationships, in your self-expression. In being your true, authentic version of yourself.