y: Esther Ubong-Abasi

What kind of a world do we live in today?
I’ll tell you, it’s the one where people feel the need to be accepted by others. Fitting in is the norm now and I wonder where learning to accept our differences has gone? Embracing our variations and square pegs in triangular holes has been thrown outside the window.
Today, what we have is needles trying to be threads and pliers trying to be hammers. Why? I don’t know, but I do know, what these new trends are causing all around the world presently.

Society puts pressure on man to conform to or behave in a certain way so they can be accepted. I find this very ironic because society is made up of different men, so in a sense, it’s like we are putting this pressure on ourselves. It’s like we do not accept ourselves enough; its flaws, failures and all. We feel everyone else really has to change. Because a circle can never really be a square and vice versa; when people find out they cannot be the exact copy of someone else, or they don’t really fit in to a certain group which others are part of, the first thing they do is try to change how they are, so as to be the closest version of what they feel is better. Imagine, if I do this, then I am on the road to completely losing my true personality and the sense of who I am. I will create a whole new personality that is somewhere in between who I am and who society wants me to be (my opinion).

Someone else looks at me, my cross breed personality, and decides that he/she wants to be like me. Thus, the process starts all over then, we have a world full of people who are entirely different from whom they initially were. Strangely, there are people who make money off this fact, selling self discovery to the rest of us, but really we all have a different fragment of someone else personality in us and that’s the truth. By virtue of our interaction, experiences and history, nobody can claim to be without a fault.

When can you say then that you have truly discovered who you really are? How do you even go about the path to true self discovery? And when you eventually discover this, how do you begin to become that person, this new personality you have only just discovered?

We need to stop wasting time bothering about if we are truly, who we really desired to be, rather, let’s try and find happiness in any situation. And for the record, I am not talking about purpose here, that is something entirely different and I do believe it is important to find out OUR purposes, since everyone has a unique purpose and we can discover them by inspiration.
However, I am talking solely on our personality. We should try not to bother so much about our personality, to avoid consulting people who want to reveal our personality to us. Tarot readers, and the likes, star signs etc. that promise to tell us how we should act and live should not be what we surround ourselves with. Let our faith, conscience and instincts guide us. If we happen to act like anyone else so be it. One will most likely pick up a few things from other people, it’s entirely normal. If you are Scorpio, you wouldn’t die if you act like a Cancer or Sagittarius once in a while or Leo, Libra, Capricorn or whatever, the question is, are you living your best life and being the very best version of yourself? Once the answer to this question is yes, then you are on your way to true happiness and ultimate self validation.