Be Yourself! Just Not Like That.
I'm in a ranty mood this morning. I'm going to channel that pent-up energy into more productive things, but I do have a few thoughts I'd like to record somewhere.
Life, as has famously been observed, is short. Too damn short to go around second-guessing every thought you have and every goal you set for yourself. I wasted decades of my life trying to be anybody other than who I was, and that's time I'll never get back.
The reason I did that was purely my hyper-critical parents. Growing up, I was constantly told that I was an amazing, genius talent, but that somehow nothing I ever did was good enough. If I got good grades, they wanted to know why I didn't get perfect grades. If I got perfect grades, they wanted to know why I didn't do the extra credit. If I did the extra credit, they wanted to know why I was fat and not getting any exercise.
The clear message a child receives from a steady diet of this bullshit is "You are inherently wrong. It doesn't matter what you do, the fact that it's you doing it makes it bad."
Now as a fully-realized adult, I understand that the proper response is "Up yours with a wire brush!" But as a child, when it's your own parents doing this to you, you don't understand that it's just two screwed-up people operating in a tiny little sphere of influence. To you it's your whole world.
My parents are gone now, and as I say, I'm an adult and responsible for standing on my own feet, making my own decisions, and making my life be what I want it to be instead of just taking what's handed to me. Yes, those decades are gone and I can never have them back. But I do have right now, and I'm going to use it to its best possible purpose.
I'm gonna be me. They way I like me.
-The Gneech
Life, as has famously been observed, is short. Too damn short to go around second-guessing every thought you have and every goal you set for yourself. I wasted decades of my life trying to be anybody other than who I was, and that's time I'll never get back.
The reason I did that was purely my hyper-critical parents. Growing up, I was constantly told that I was an amazing, genius talent, but that somehow nothing I ever did was good enough. If I got good grades, they wanted to know why I didn't get perfect grades. If I got perfect grades, they wanted to know why I didn't do the extra credit. If I did the extra credit, they wanted to know why I was fat and not getting any exercise.
The clear message a child receives from a steady diet of this bullshit is "You are inherently wrong. It doesn't matter what you do, the fact that it's you doing it makes it bad."
Now as a fully-realized adult, I understand that the proper response is "Up yours with a wire brush!" But as a child, when it's your own parents doing this to you, you don't understand that it's just two screwed-up people operating in a tiny little sphere of influence. To you it's your whole world.
My parents are gone now, and as I say, I'm an adult and responsible for standing on my own feet, making my own decisions, and making my life be what I want it to be instead of just taking what's handed to me. Yes, those decades are gone and I can never have them back. But I do have right now, and I'm going to use it to its best possible purpose.
I'm gonna be me. They way I like me.
-The Gneech
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determined
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