Everyone portrays them self under various veils. We act differently in this group or that, from one situation to another. The ways we carry ourselves and who we put ourselves out to be shifts as we go about life. These shifts are, more or less, necessary. You wouldn’t joke with a professor during lecture the same way you joke with your friends at the bar.
The problem with unnecessary personality discrepancies, naturally, is that they are unauthentic. At PYM, authenticity is key to create good content and serves as a reminder to stay rooted in self. Trying to sustain a personality, “brand” or imagine that isn’t rooted in your true self will have you wilting away. False expectations (being standards set that aren’t building up YOU) laid by society, environment, friends, family and yourself can quickly overpower your truth if you haven’t given it the focus and care it needs. Cutting these expectations from your life, or at least taking them with a grain of salt, begins with cultivating your true self by cultivating true reality. I’m talking about social media.
Cultivating Your Reality
I pay the premium fee for VSCo (not sponsored, but hi) every month regardless of how broke I am, because it makes my content look better. I like it, it’s fun. I don’t have a VSCO following so I post as if my feed is a vision board/ selfie hideaway/ creative dumping ground. For this reason, VSCO is my favorite social media platform.
Why exactly?
I used to spend a lot of time thinking about the logistics of posting on Instagram. I think we all can agree we invest too much thought, too often on what we are sharing with others. Which picture of the 25 I took should I post, what time do I upload, what location, what filter, what about the caption?! On more than one occasion, i’ve spent more time on the details of posting rather than organically remembering the details of a moment already come and gone. And considerably irrelevant to the clouse chase of social media. Taking and sharing photos is fun. Like the guy that went around recording all the Coachella goers that were doing mini photoshoots, let people live, it’s fine. Seriously. But, I was centering too much attention on cultivating the image of my reality rather than reality itself.
On VSCO, with no audience, I got comfortable with breaking down the barrier between putting out a specific image of how my life is and just posting what I wanted for my own reasons of how and when and why. Instead of trying to calculate what story or caption would portray me in the best and trendiest light, I wasn’t really thinking about it outside of being a creative platform to express myself. Social media had become so much of my reality that I forgot that all the posts and stories, likes and shares, were only a side hustle to life. Real life is lived in real time, not digitized and hashtagged to hell.
Killing The “Cool Girl”
Making yourself stop caring is hard when you don’t have an intrinsic reason. Had I known how good freedom from unnecessary expectations is, I would have pushed myself to get free much sooner. I had to retrain my way of thinking because I’d been told for so long that cool girls are bitch girls and if you aren’t a bitchy girl then who are you? The icy bitch that terrorizes every high school in every teen movie ever made…that girl. This new/old expectation for being a cool girl has perhaps gotten worse with the rise of social media influencers that make their business off the heartless, broding baby girl aesthetic. Don’t get me wrong I love a good moody Pinterest board, but acting as an icy bitch has never made anyone a cool girl. It’s only ever made them a bitch.
Even if you’ve never gone full Regina George, carrying the weight of that sort of negative energy and expectations for yourself is brutal. You have to kill the cool girl drive in yourself and start letting your true self breath. I say this as a person who believes people are innately good (expect for those gross outliers).
I really like to think that people are becoming more aware of how coldness doesn’t equal coolness. The heartless trend has been a longstanding one that surely has pushed some people to savage greatness, but at a cost to themselves and those around them. Holding the expectation of being “cool” over your head and the heads of others is an unfair reason to complicate an already hard to negative society. Especially when a version of cool is treating people lesser because they don’t fall into that overrated category. Yes, this is me calling out all the bitches out there that expectations of others even more toxic because of their own delusion toxic standards that aren’t worth adhering to. Be nicer to others, be nicer to yourself. Freezing your heart can’t feel good and while the dethaw might leave some fresh wounds, it’s better than…uh…being a bitch?
Believe Your True Self Is Enough
Sometimes we have to put on a show. There are arguable standards for a reason (refer to example in first paragraph). What I’ve found is a lot of times the unnecessary projections of ourselves doesn’t come from reasonability, but from a place of insecurity. We do, say, share, post, live what/how we do because humans crave, need validation. That need drives us to conform to expectations basically for acceptance. Meaning we think, on a certain unconscious level, that being accepted wearing a mask is better than risking it and living as a fully authentic version of ourselves.
We don’t trust in our own power, greatness, capabilities, qualities and beauty.
We look too often to the expectations we have tried to match and think we aren’t happy because we don’t meet them. In reality, we’re unhappy because we weren’t made to meet them. We were made to forge our own paths and build our own identities.
We have to feel free to be ourselves and be daring enough to find out what that means. When we do those things, the universe can do amazing things with and for you.
After a life of expectations, social media and the idea of who we are supposed to be, I was so tired. There were paths and people in my life that didn’t feel right. Once i let go of all of that and my real self energy became my only energy, I felt the universe was more at peace. Life and all its happenings felt more organic and I myself felt lighter and more natural.
This is your reminder (or wake up call) to be who and what YOU truly are. Don’t let fear or negativity or clouded judgement keep you from yourself. Trust yourself, trust the universe and trust me when I say you’ll be grateful you did.