On Letting Yourself Be Who You Are

A fight to the death for the sake of your life.

“If you allow yourself to be the person that you are, then everything will come into rhythm.” — John O’Donohue

This has been the great battle of my life: to allow myself to be the person that I am.

I used to believe I was the only one who struggled with such a silly thing. Everyone else seemed to know precisely who they were, to be perfectly fine with it, and had long since left the question behind to get on with the serious business of living. But now I see that allowing yourself to be who you are is everyone’s greatest battle: In the first part, to know who in the hell that person is; and, in the second, to choose them, and love them, and let them be free in the world, regardless of whether other people like them or love them, or hate and despise them, or want to kill them.

To allow yourself to be who you are is a fight to the death for the sake of your life. To me, it often feels like being underwater, my chest burning in agony, desperate for the free air, my sea-warped eyes glimpsing the glimmering light of the sun somewhere above me, my limbs frantically stroking, waving, punching, churning, straining to reach the surface. But foreign hands keep clawing at my body, grasping and gripping my flailing limbs to pull me back down.

It might be less confusing if it were more malicious—if all that snatching and grabbing really was fueled by hate. But it’s not. At least, mostly it’s not. There’s just a way the world wants you to be, a function it wants you to perform, a role it wants you to play, a mask, or gallery of masks, it wants you to wear, to keep its bromidic fear-driven systems churning along unperturbed. Nobody alive today built the systems. But we were all born into them. And trying to fight against them for the sake of the person you really are is without question one of the most noble battles a human heart can undertake.

“To be nobody but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.” — e e cummings

There’s a natural rhythm, unique to every life, a way of being and moving, of flowing and making, of seeing and naming, and most of all, loving, and the world is made richer by every soul who finds the rhythm that belongs just to them, and surrenders themselves to it in love.

No one can tell you what it is, or how it flows, or what it sounds like when it sings, because it is yours alone to discover. It is as unique as you are. It has never happened before, because you have never happened before. It is your song, your rhythm, your Good True Beautiful Way. And for every soul who fights to find it, and allows themselves to be the person they really are, the light in the world grows brighter, and the desperate grip of the world’s fear-driven systems relaxes a little bit more.

“Do not wish to be anything but what you are, and try to be that perfectly.” ― Francis de Sales

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