"Maybe the answer was you all along": The Philosophy of Choosing Yourself

I spent my entire school life in one building. 14 years in the same environment and with the same people. When I graduated school, I slowly began losing my friends. The same friends I probably would have moved mountains for, but would they have done the same for me?

I lived all my life thinking that only helping and being ‘selfless’ to others is my salvation. However, as I grew up, I began rejecting that idea. Because the more I gave to people, the more I started to lose myself. My interests. My identity.

You are your only salvation

I truly believe that selflessness should go both ways- to others and to oneself. If I keep choosing others every single time, how will I live my life? For everyone else to choose themselves first but still blame me for trying to do the same.

We spend so much time waiting to be chosen. By a university, an employer, by friends who you swear will always invite you in their plans, by strangers on the internet through engagement. Somewhere, our worth is minimized into what someone else says. For many of us including me once upon a time, the answer was to just simply try harder if you are not accepted first.

I remember hiding my actual self, masking my interests and my weirdest quirks that make me who I am, just to get along with people with a fear that they will judge me if I am just authentically me. We copy someone because we think that is the only way I can be chosen. The most disappointing truth about that life is that you never feel enough, the finish line keeps moving away like you are approaching a mirage.  

No matter how much you force a connection, if it is not choosing you, then your efforts are bound to go vain. Choosing yourself is the reality wherein you exist even beyond other’s expectations. 

If the notion of choosing yourself seems selfish, then why do we do it in an airplane emergency? Put on your own oxygen mask before you help others. Unless you put on your own mask, you are not fit to help others. This is the same theory I still try to apply in my life.

I studied it.

It means that you do not owe anyone a big paragraph to say a simple ‘no’. It means cutting ties with situations that only pretend to tolerate you and not celebrate you like you do to others. It means simply resting instead of feeling guilty for being ‘unproductive’; something that I still struggle with today. 

And most importantly, to understand that one’s value is not based on their utility to others. It might not be easy to choose yourself beyond all the failures and imperfections you label yourself with. But this discomfort in choosing yourself is what shapes us the most. 

In a world filled with messages pushing comparison to us in terms of looks, achievements, relationships, promotions or just a simple productive daily routine vlog, it is very easy to believe that everyone has it all figured out while we are still struggling. 

Waiting to be ‘good enough’ to choose yourself is like waiting to magically be skilled in guitar to start strumming. Every time you speak kindly to yourself, walk away from what never resonates to you, move on from spaces you have outgrown, and fight the little voice inside you that screams ‘you will never make it’, you realize that the answer was you all along. 

It is to build yourself before guiding others. 

The world is judgemental and will criticize you for any decision you make. They will pin point you into categories you never asked to be in the first place. Some might say that you are ‘too ambitious’, some might say you are ‘not ambitious enough’. If one spends their entire life trying to satisfy everyone’s expectations, they will eventually lose sight of the one person whose opinions and expectations matter the most- your own. 

You are your only helping hand after all. A truth I am still trying to learn.