authenticity

In my journey of self-love I have realized that I am constantly either self-sacrificing or self-sabotaging, never self-serving. I am only 23 yet I feel like I have been having an existential crisis since I was born. When I am alone my thoughts keep running back to the fact that there still is the big possibility of there being another 50 years ahead of me and there is no way I want to still be stuck in this version of myself in those years ahead.

Sure, I have always been someone but I have never been myself. I have always felt like water being transferred from cup to cup each a different size, shape, and height. I had always been scared to make moves for myself, so I let others take control of my thoughts, actions, and beliefs. There is a saying that goes 'people will always view you in the form in which they held the most power over you. No matter how much you change.' This qoute made me come to terms with the fact that no one had wanted me for me, they wanted me for what I could do for them.

I had been living most of my life in a state of secrecy with a powerless drive for life. I have always had this unsettling feeling in the bottom of my stomach, that I chalked up to it being my heart palpitating at the bottom, waiting for me to take notice that my chest is empty. My life has been a constant state of anxiety and fear fusioned together to create me.

It took awhile and a lot of hurting to finally realize that in this time frame, if I was going to be self-sacrificing it was going to have to be for myself this time. I realized I can't get what I give, I can only give what I get, and on top of that the only one who would provide me with what I truly needed for my own confidence and success was myself and my higher source.

I have spent most of my life looking for everyone's approval except my own. I modified my life to fit with the expecations and people that would make me look good rather than feel good.

I took notice that most of my anxiety, when it came to surrounding myself with people, was that I felt that I was there to cater to their needs and boost their egos. I have constantly held myself back by focusing on others potentinal or out of fear of 'stepping on toes'. When I wasn't worried about the people around me I was worried about how I held myself, behaved, talked, walked, and breathed and how that would affect how I could survive in the world.

I used to quite literally hold my breath if I was around too many people, because I felt as if there wasn't enough room for me to breathe and co-exist within the group or space.

Finding out who I am authentically has been a challege because a lot of the time I have felt like I am no longer myself. My authentic self is someone completely different to who I used to identify as.

I always remember a list of things I wrote for my sister, a list of things I didn't and did like. I find myself having to do that again in this time frame because I have realized there is an old authentic me that needs to move out of the way for the new authentic me.

the list goes a little like:

one: don't prove yourself, be yourself. I have always been looking to prove myself, prove that I am worthy of my own existence, but I have grown to learn that being here and existing is enough proof that I have proved myself to be enough for my own existence.

two: do not give yourself away, show yourself. You are the show, you are the star, the main character and all the side characters too. As a child what looked like extreme generosity and a big heart to others was actually a need to put myself last constantly, yes I do have a big heart but sometimes that big heart was way too giving, way too selfless for my own good. When we were given the choice to choose something I always allowed others to choose first to make sure they got what they wanted, while I tried to be and was grateful for what I would be stuck with for putting myself last. My joy came from watching my sisters get what they wanted while I took what they didn't.

three: I've been my most authentic when I went searching for myself and found that I am a garden rooted and blossoming and found that even the wilted parts of me were still a big part in my garden. In search of myself I have seen that while we worry so much about all the parts we are loosing of ourselves, we forget to see that it is not loosing but evolving ourselves. I have learned from changing seasons: What dies still grows back even if it grows differently, it still comes back.

four: I am the light at the end of the tunnel and I am the dark tunnel I must navigate through to see myself at the end. Mourning has always been a part of the process. I have always felt that healing and growing has always been more of a mourning process rather than one of love and light as some suggest. It is a dark place to have to see who we are, what we were and how what we are becoming is the light at the end of the tunnel and to just accept how good it feels to actually see the sun rather than mourn the time we spent in the dark tunnel.

five: I am most authentic when I love myself as who I was, who I am, and who I am becoming. I am my mistakes and my corrections. After mourning I think the only thing that comes after is an immense amount of self-love, gratitude, discipline, and abundance really. Once we realize there is no one to blame and only ourselves to correct life gets better.

six: I am most authentic when I pick myself up, dust myself off and continue forward while laughing. That has always been and still is the hardest thing for me to do. To release the idea of perfectionism. Growing up, I had always drilled in my head that I was not allowed to be anything but on top. I couldn't be the underdog, I couldn't be struggling, forgetful, or anything that was deemed 'weak'. I have realized that it is being weak and being able to show that and say that this is okay, is the biggest strength you can have.

seven: I am the seven world wonders in my own world. Self-love is so much more than just being able to say that you are beautiful or that you accept yourself as you are. Acceptance is not the same as adoration and I think that adoring myself and viewing myself as a grand creation has given me the confidence to shine bright in my authentic skin.

eight: I have been authentic when I decided to join boxing to replace what I missed when I couldn't find it in jujitsu anymore since you've been gone. As a child I used to be so timid, my only safety net was that everyone knew that I was in jujitsu and I may have been quiet but I probably was hiding something bigger; A warning that always screamed I am not a threat but a promise.

nine: I have been most authentic when I choose my thoughts over everyone else's opinions. Growing into my new skin has been seeing and hearing my own thoughts and visions over the noise of everyone else. My most authentic has been deciding that what makes me feel good is only up to me.

ten: My most authentic is when the drum fill I create is symbolic of my heart beating in my chest again.

eleven: My most authentic self is a bowl of hot cheetos covered in lime juice, a ramen with wicked amounts of Tapatio in it when I'm sick because I still am sad my mom never made chicken soup when we were sick as children, Adventure Time and Imagine Dragons when I'm sad, and metaphors to explain what I feel I cannot express.

twelve: I wear my most authentic self on my sleeve but cover it with a jacket of fear because I wonder a little too much if people will prefer my jacket over my shirt. I used to think I didn't know who I was, truly I had always been living as myself but tweaked to everyones liking. I say this as a metaphor of my sleeve and my jacket because my favourite thing about me as a child was always my cool shirts, but I always wore a jacket to hide my body because I always thought about how my mother would tell me people would judge me and even if I didn't care that I was fat the world did. I used to think those jackets somehow made me better but really all I wanted was for everyone to see my cool shirts.

thirteen: My most authentic self is this unexplainable love for Paris, drums, squirrels, the color blue and pink, and my adrogyny, and the only explanation my grown up self has is these are the things that have always made me feel good and like I am in the right body.

fourteen: my most authentic self is writing about what I have tattooed on my sleeve. I have always worn my experience and my most authentic self is realizing that writing them down is telling a story with words instead of scars. Scars are nothing but braille on my body telling my story and this book of me is the words of my outlook.

fifteen: my most authentic self is longboarding and thinking about that time I yelled that the road took you like sandpaper after I watched you come down that hill and you went flying off my board and my board flying straight into a rock and broke right in half.

sixteen: my most authentic self is all the new things I have grown to love like bird watching, anime, more reading, politics, humanitary work, and more to find out.

seventeen: my most authentic self is unleashing all the things I had been supressing like rock music and oldies but I don't listen to the genres enough, or boxing, vintage items, and most of all my voice, whether it comes out as kindess, jokes, sarcasm, love, and anything else my most authentic is when I have allowed myself to say what I want to say.

eighteen: my most authentic self is stubborn, sometimes apathetic. I am learning that being authentic is having things that seem unappetizing but in the right situations it is exacty what we need to be.

nineteen: my most authentic self is working on themselves and figuring out how to use those things to my advantage and quit letting them be my disadvantages. Disadvantages are only things that you have yet to learn how to control into advantages.

twenty: My most authentic is my emotions, I've never felt allowed to express myself and each time I allow myself to properly feel an emotion my inner child smiles up at my grown up self stepping into their skin, not out of it. What an accomplishment, I'm so proud of me.

twenty-two: My most authentic self is independent, self sufficient, and trying to figure out how to balance love in that mix too. I am a strong person who doesn't need anyone, not a man, not a woman, not a single thing but myself; yet I am learning to see that my most authentic is when I allow people to love me, when I allow people to bring out in me a joy that is amplified because of them.

twenty-three: my most authentic self is Ash not Ashley and that is sometimes representive of how I am the ashes I rose from.

My most authentic self is honestly still a work in progress, considering I have barely decided to start uncovering what I might look like and be if I chose to embrace myself; rather than count scars, I count stars. That is the most authentic part of me.

I have been my most authentic when I decided to choose what I know I am over what everyone else thinks I am. My most authentic self is deciding to be the actual writer not the ghost writer that gives their voice away for a couple of extra dollars.

My most authentic has shown through when I decided I was the one living my life and there wasn't anything or anyone that could tell me what my life was. I have shown through as authentically me when I decided to step out of my own way and show up in my birthday suit without actually being naked. I went as far as I could with the metaphor of being naked without ever having to take off my clothes, because after all a metaphor is only a figure of speech to represent what I want to say, a figure of expression.