Just my opinion...

Last week ,as I was going through the motions of reading the blogs that I follow , I came to a blog that I am always inspired by .I read the post and when I got to the bottom of the post I read this sentence " Who would your true self be if you were willing to drop the baggage and take other people's opinions more seriously than your own"? A voice inside me rebelled against this. I heard it say " You want me to value the opinion of someone else over my own? You see , I found this a contradiction to the authentic me. How authentic am I if I am willing to take someone elses opinion over my own? I am a firm believer that the answer to who I am is within me already and that it is my job to excavate the real me.That sentence that day was something that I thought about"alot" .The context that the author wrote it in was that someone had said something positive about the author and caused her to see herself in a new way. What if the comment had been a negative one? Would it have changed the weight of the opinion ? It still would have came from the same source . So what weight should we give any opinion in deciding who we are? I see myself as a filter. Positive and negative opinions go in , they are weighed by my authentic self to see if I accept them or not and I choose what feels like it fits.If it fits then I keep it , if not , then it is discarded. I challenge that the reason the author kept that persons opinion that day was because it fit her authentic self and it was brought to her attention that maybe she should consider this as part of who she is. She accepted it to be true , therefore it was ,but it was HER who accepted it. Everyday we are told positive and negative things about ourselves, it is our job to sort and apply. I cannot trust that someone can see me better than I see myself. I have to trust myself to be authentic and truthful with myself.Take for example, if I tell a skinny person that she is fat and she knows she's not ,most likely she will filter it and not give any weight to it ,but if I tell an overweight person she is fat she will know in herself the truth and it will leave a mark . If the person is skinny and for whatever reason believes shes fat she would give my opinion the same weight as the overweight person. She is choosing this to be part of who she is.Therefore , isn't it still her own opinion? I am not saying that we should disregard everyone elses opinion. I am saying we should use them only as a means to discovering ourselves, questioning ourselves and as part of the self excavating process. I cannot ask the world "Who I Am"? that is a question only I can answer.

Be your authentic self. Your authentic self is who you are when you have no fear of judgment, or before the world starts pushing you around and telling you who you're supposed to be. Your fictional self is who you are when you have a social mask on to please everyone else. Give yourself permission to be your authentic self.
~ Dr. Phil