Growing up I always played a role. It was really easy for me to shift between star athlete, beaugty queen, class clown, book nerd — whatever the situation called for I was ready to step into that role.
The only role I’d never played was the main character in my own life.
It’s always been really important to be to be the best at everything. I needed to fulfil the expectations of those around me. From being really good at all the sports to being the prettiest, skinniest version I could be. To getting good grades and getting the promotion. Being the youngest to have a job to being the funniest in the friendship group.
Recently, my therapist asked me who I wanted to be. What was important to me?
And for probably the second time in my life, I didn’t have the words.
I’d never considered whether I was truly passionate about the things I was working tirelessly towards. I just did them to the best of my ability over and over again.
So she challenged me to start thinking about what I was doing for me, what I wanted my future to look like and to write it down.
I’m still really passionate about sports, I’m definitely invested in feeling good about how I look but I doin’t care about titles or climbing the ladder at work.
I’m really excited about excelling at things, but things that are important to me. Like being a good person, helping others and affecting change. I do want to be healthy and fit - but skinny isn’t something I strive for, I want to be athletic and strong. At work, I want to be paid well and respected - and then I want to be left alone because I care more about life outside the office.
I still struggle greatly with being the main character in my own story. I care a lot more than I thought about what others think about how I appear on the outside. And that’s going to take time to move past.
Having to shift from being conditioned to be the best at everything and meet certain life milestones - and then not meeting all of those milestones has been really really hard. Figuring out those milestones were never what I really wanted has been really really hard. I’ve spent so much time playing a charachter that I don’t know who I am all the time.
But it’s really important for me to figure that out.
It’s really important to me to spend the rest of my time in life playing the main character according to my own script.
I challenge you to really take the time to discover whay parts of you are YOU and which parts were written FOR you. And then work towards developing the parts that are authentically you.