All too often we make apologies for who we are.
Well, I’m here to tell you this needs to stop.
We need to stop making apologies for ourselves. For just being who we are as individual human beings. Eff that!
We are each unique individuals who may live life a little or a lot differently than those around us. Um, so what? That doesn’t mean they have the right to judge us and call us wrong. They will still judge, but we don’t have to listen, nor do we have to internalize their voices and listen to them at a volume higher than the volume of our own beliefs.
Now I’m not giving you permission to go out and behave like an a$$hole. Nope. If you’ve been behaving like an a$$hole, you definitely need to apologize. And clean up your act.
But if you’re a genuinely decent person who happens to apologize for just being you, well, it’s time to stop it.
Let me give you a rather mundane example…
I am not the tidiest of souls. I wish I were the perfect picture of a clean freak, but alas, I am not. I place cleaning way low on my list of priorities. Somewhere just slightly above “house being comdemned” in the hierarchy of domestic needs. But I grew up in a house of clean freaks. Yet somehow I just didn’t get the clean freak gene. (Yes, there is a gene for that. Trust me, the cleaning gene is either on or not on the map of your genome! And it is not on mine!)
For years I would apologize for the state of my house – which by the way, is not particularly untidy, just not free of all dust-like particulate matter at all times and occasionally needing a good vacuuming. But nonetheless, I apologized. Because it didn’t meet the standard that my folks had set all those years ago.
But recently I realized – and not just about cleaning – that I set the standards in my own life. That I get to decide what my priorities are and what I choose to do when and what I may choose to not do at all. And if someone judges me harshly for it, then so be it.
In other words, make no apologies.
What have you been apologizing for that you need to give up?
Right on!
Wish I had come to this realization at the age you have.
Perhaps that’s the universal feeling that accompanies this realization…”I wish I’d figured this out sooner.” Because I feel like I’ve come to it late in the game.
All part of our individual growth processes, I suppose.