Finding Yourself

There are hundreds of ways to lose yourself, but the easiest of them all is refusing to acknowledge who you truly are in the first place.

Rachel Hollis

Wow.. I am actually really terrible at posting on this blog! Sorry it has been so long but I hope you guys enjoy this read 🙂

I finally got to read Rachel Hollis’s book Girl Wash Your Face, and it was definitely a 10-out-of-10. One of my favorite take-aways was the need to truly accept ourselves. The good and the bad… the parts of ourselves that we understand and the parts that confuse the heck out of us. I think this is a concept that everyone struggles with at some point in their life; I know I have. I am always confusing myself. My personality and who I am cannot be summed up in a few short words because I am a whirlwind of chaos.

I would consider myself a high achiever, people-pleaser, and hard worker. I would not be who I am or where I am today without these traits. However, it is these same traits that have given me many opportunities that have also challenged me to stay true to myself not matter what outside forces may be acting against me. It is so easy to let the words and desires of others become our own. I can think of hundreds of examples; your parents want you to be a star football player so this becomes your ultimate goal…. everyone tells you that you would make an amazing teacher so you go to college and study education… someone tells you that you are not smart enough to be a doctor and you believe them. For a long time these desires do seem to be your own; that is until the football player realizes that he actually love music, the aspiring teacher is a year into his/her studies and drops out to work at the family business, and the student that was told he/she was not smart enough gets his/her Ph.D. Like I said it is easy to know and see ourselves the way others see us. But how many of us can see past what everyone else sees?

When people ask me to describe myself the first thing I say is “I am confusing.” I say this because while I am those traits above I am also the complete opposite. I am extremely sarcastic, sassy, and stubborn. I like to test boundaries and bend the rules. A lot of people that know me only see my earlier traits. Spend more than 10 minutes talking to me and you are likely to hear multiple curse words come out of my mouth. Few people know that I can see myself being covered in one-to-many tattoos by the end of my life. I can also see myself quitting my job to travel the world to sit at random local coffee shops reading the day away. My bucket list does not include any real goals but instead bungee jumping, sky diving, scaling a building, and living in one of those tiny houses at some point in my life. And that while I am good at communicating with others and love helping people, I prefer spending much of my time alone. These are the traits that confuse me and that I sometimes push to the side for the other parts of myself.

I realized that it is when I try to turn off this part of myself that I not only become stressed but also extremely unhappy. At the beginning of this year, I think it was my first blog post, I wrote about working on loving ourselves this year. Accepting all of my traits and knowing how they do and do not work together is a big part of that. I am a lot happier than I was a year ago and its because I stopped second guessing my wants. I started putting my thoughts above others and believing in myself instead of letting others believe in me for me. I chose my life and that is an amazing feeling. I do not have to fit into anyone else’s frame…no matter how big the frame they have for me may be.

We all have traits that we hide or shut off because we do not like them, or because others have told us to stop them. However, we are doing ourselves a disservice if we do not acknowledge these traits and learn just how they play into our complex personalities. Our questionable traits may just be the traits we need to write record breaking music, nail an acting gig, or survive medical school. Stop putting yourself in other people’s bubble and start living YOUR life. I promise you that not only will you be happier but you will start to achieve things you never thought you would.

Pop that bubble,

xoxo Marissa ❤