Living the Life you Want

If you don’t like the way life is going change it, is what I tell myself when I feel like life is not going how I want it to go; you have the ability to make life any way you want, all you have to do is believe and work hard enough that people’s opinions won’t matter. Life is too short to live how other people want you to live, is something else that is always said to people when they feel like society is forcing them t live a certain way. Nothing in this world is worth your happiness including false validation from a society that cares so little about you; these people would rather see you fall than lift you up and help you on your life’s journey. There are steps that you can take to live the life that you want and be more independent from the shackles of society and their written and unwritten rules that they feel people have to follow in order to be accepted. Step one is to give up the idea that society cares about you or what you think, the next step is to start doing things that make you more comfortable with who you are as a person, and finally, just give up caring about what people think.

Let's start with step one, society is nothing more than old traditions that are outdated and put in place to keep certain people from achieving a more successful station in life; these rules are so old that they have dust on them and yet we still live by them. We live in a culture that will build a person up in one breath and then tear them down in the next; people don’t like seeing someone doing better than them unless it is for something that they know they could never do. The second you realize that society is one big herd mentality you will be able to break away from that and start to do your own thing, and in turn feel more at peace. It wasn’t long before I myself realized that it was a lot easier to just do my own thing and not let what society deems as standard be my point of reference for how I chose to live the life I was given, I grew up and went my own way in life. I truly believe that once a person stops trying to live up to some unattainable standard of life they will be happier and be free to live the life that makes them excited to wake up in the morning.

The second step in this journey is to be unapologetically you and don’t let anyone try to make you feel less than, for simply existing, most of these people are just sad that they don’t have the strength to stand up and live their truth and want you to feel just as miserable. You are taught at a young age that you can be whatever you want but then become an adult and are made to feel like a freak for wanting to be something that society doesn’t like. At the end of the day, you are the one who has to look yourself in the mirror and be ok with the person staring back at you; no one can judge you for anything because we have wanted to be someone we like. I learned from a young age that it was easier to just be myself than to try to pretend to be someone else because after a while that was going to get hard to try to keep up with so I just became who I wanted.

The idea of letting someone else control my actions based on what they thought of me is something that I know I can’t do; people are going to think whatever they want and I can’t let that dictate what I say or do with my life. Your actions have to be your own and not those of other people; someone else’s thoughts should not be the deciding factor in how you make moves because after all, they are not going to pay your bills or tuck you in at night. Once you take back control of your life you will feel so much better about everything that you do; taking back control is something that not a lot of people are willing to do for fear of public shunning. It may not be easy to stop thinking about what others think of you but once it’s done, it's hard to go back because you start to wonder why you ever thought about it in the first place. Besides that it’s just more fun to do something and feel the need to know if anyone liked it or not; I know that most people do things alike but that shouldn’t be your main focus when doing something, you should want to have fun.

I want to wrap this up by saying that although it is the norm to be enthralled with what society is feeling and want to act accordingly, you don’t have to do that if you don’t want to and it’s OK to have a mind of your own and think for yourself. The world is not going to stop revolving if you decide to just do something for yourself and not for the majority of people who genuinely don’t care about what you are doing or saying. Be yourself and love who that person is because you have to live with you and other people don’t make you who you are; life is something that can be taken away at any moment so living it like it is your last is a real thing, so do that and be happy.