L.S. Engler

If I needed any more confirmation that the change I’m planning to make in my life is the right one, it arrived in droves yesterday. Apparently, I could stand to just bear my soul and be frank more often, because yesterday’s post got such a great response (though, rereading it, I wished I had edited a little first. Holy commas and fragments, Batman!). More page views than I’ve had in a very long. More comments than I’d ever had in a while. A great shout-out over at mrs bongle, a first for her blog! Five (!) new followers! And, if that wasn’t enough, I had a pretty damn good sales day at work, topped off with the boss man pulling me aside to have a little chat with me about how impressed he is with the work I’ve been doing and how he’ll really gun for me getting that promotion I applied for, or at the very least, a little bit of a raise.

All because I was honest and forthright and truthful to what was going on in my head. All because I’ve been embracing a new philosophy these past few weeks, and it has made such a profound difference in my life that I’m not entirely sure I can accurately express it in these words. But I’m going to try. I have been feeling incredible these last few weeks, my confidence has spiked, and so many good things are happening, and I’m pretty sure it’s because I’ve embraced a new philosophy and has let it guide me from this point forward:

I will stop being the person I think people want me to be. I will just be the person I am.

Okay, so, maybe for some of you, this isn’t a big deal. It’s kind of a given. But, for someone like me, this is revolutionary. I’ve always been the type of person to put other people before me, and I’ve always been driven to meet the expectations others have for me, whether they’re legitimate expectations or ones I’ve made up in my own head. My tendency to try to be what I believe others want me to be really hit me full force about two weeks ago, at the end of yet another dating fiasco where I really missed a great opportunity because I was too caught up in not being who I am, and, instead, was trying to be who I thought the other person wanted me to be. Turns out, the person I am was what he was looking for, not the person I was being because he asked for something else. Granted, there were other cracks in the system that has lead me to believe that we wouldn’t have worked out anyway (which is a real shame, because I think he’s an incredible person, and I hope friendship is still in our futures, if anything), but I doubted myself. I edited myself. I restricted what I was saying or doing on a faulty perception.

No more. At work, I stressed out because I couldn’t meet the expectations of someone else. No more. In my relationships, in my work, in my writing, I am resolving to just be me. I’m not going to be the person people want me to be, or who I think they want me to be, just me. I’ve been resolving to be that person for the past two weeks now, and nothing but good things have been coming my way. I’m not stressed out (okay, maybe a little, but that’s par for the course), I’ve got some very interesting relationships budding (and rebudding!), and, the cream of the crop, I decided to just let it all out in a blog post yesterday, and my efforts were rewarded with a great deal of support and confirmation. Okay, maybe not everyone is as neurotic as I am about commenting and worrying about what other people think of me, but I do have a lot of pretty awesome people in my court right now, and they seem to definitely like seeing me be me, and not someone else’s perception of me.

Hopefully, as I continue being me, you still like me. But if you don’t? I’m probably better off without you anyway. Boo-yah.

Also, so remember those five new followers I mentioned? Let’s take a second to thank them, too! Welcome aboard, freepictureworld, 5 Things to do Today, Britt Skarbanek, Sedition Human, and Poetikin! So good to have you all aboard!