We all wear many masks in life, the person we are with our family may be totally different than the person we are with our friends. Our work mask is different from the mask we have when in social gatherings.
Along the way we have picked up many masks that have gotten piled up on us that the question is who are we really?
When you are living authentically you are the truest version of yourself no matter what the setting is. Who you are alone is the person you are with people surrounding you. The freedom and relief it takes to live like this, is the most important way of living that you will ever experience.
Not too many people can do it, the fear of actually being seen can be one of the scariest things we go through. To live an authentic life, first we must be living in love with ourselves, set all judgement aside and focus on pure love. Now what we call love is different for every single person.
What I see as love can be totally different than what you may feel. I am not talking about that “in love” feeling that has been programmed into us as a way we should feel, it has much more depth than that. It is a strong emotion that comes over you and totally takes over your entire self and brings you peace, and acceptance, it makes you feel whole.
We all have the ability to do this and through early conditioning and fear based beliefs we often fall away from this emotion and a disconnect is formed that the love that is often sought after is an external search, a conditioned source, a false feeling that at times will fade away. The true emotion is inside of us, knowing who we are and being that person no matter the situation.
It is not selfish, it is not stupid, to love yourself, to care for yourself. All my life I can remember always being told to put others first, the self sacrifice in order to be a good person. I would put other people’s needs first, I would be scared if I was not and therefore being classified as a bad person. That led into being a people pleaser, and I was the best for that. I would get so burnt out helping others that I would never have the chance to take care of myself. There would be days that I needed to rest and reset but actually felt guilty in doing that. What taking a full day for myself? Who do you think you are? That emotion right there, took over my life for years. Pushing the real me down, not living purposefully authentic.
It got to the point that I started questioning this belief, why is loving myself considered to be wrong? What makes other people more deserving than myself? The fact that we turn our attention outward and not focus on ourselves is another way of giving our power away. Not fully knowing who we are means that we will never remember our true self and our amazing abilities that comes with being us. I took my authorship back and I started looking after myself, I started to get to know who I was and what made me happy, what made me act the way I did. I did a full overhaul of my being and found many beliefs that were controlling had to be cleared out.
Love was not a feeling I found all at once. It arrived quietly one day when I chose to rest without guilt. When I said no without explaining myself. When I looked in the mirror and felt something other than criticism looking back. It was not dramatic. It was simply the first moment I treated myself with the same care I had spent years giving everyone else
Authenticity is not a destination you arrive at once and stay forever. It is a daily practice of choosing yourself honestly over the version of you that others find more comfortable. Some days that choice is easy. Some days everything in your conditioning will push back hard. But every time you choose the real you over the performed one — you take another step back to yourself. That is The Return. And it starts with the simplest and most radical act available to you. Deciding that who you actually are is enough.