Of course, your friends are right that trying to change yourself so someone else will love you is a mistake, and never works. But I'd even say it's a mistake to try to change yourself into the person you think you should be.
Maybe you can think about growing into *your* best self, rather than trying to approach some ideal that has nothing to do with you. You can try to understand your own best qualities and build your life around those qualities, refining and strengthening them over time. You are a person whose own suffering gives you a deep compassion and sensitivity to the suffering of others; you are a person who can listen without judgment to people whose views are very different from your own; you are a person who is not satisfied with easy answers to complex questions; you are a person who can get joyfully lost for hours in the manipulation of abstract symbols. Talk to your friends, try to get a better sense of your strengths and weaknesses. Go with your strengths. You have many of them.
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branchandroot
Become your best self, not someone else
Date: 2006-07-31 01:28 pm (UTC)Maybe you can think about growing into *your* best self, rather than trying to approach some ideal that has nothing to do with you. You can try to understand your own best qualities and build your life around those qualities, refining and strengthening them over time. You are a person whose own suffering gives you a deep compassion and sensitivity to the suffering of others; you are a person who can listen without judgment to people whose views are very different from your own; you are a person who is not satisfied with easy answers to complex questions; you are a person who can get joyfully lost for hours in the manipulation of abstract symbols. Talk to your friends, try to get a better sense of your strengths and weaknesses. Go with your strengths. You have many of them.