It’s something you hear over and over as life advice, but it’s one of the most important and difficult things in life to find and accept. Be yourself. We spend a lot of our time thinking about what other people are thinking about us. It’s an innately human thing to want to be liked. Especially by the people you like and think are cool. We end up putting on a person costume and acting out a role for the person we think they would want us to be.

The worst thing that could happen is that it would work. That whoever you are trying to talk to find impostor you an intriguing person. Now you’re trapped. You have to go on acting out the role and denying who you are inside. That can only go on for so long. Eventually the seams of the costume are going to fray and the real you will be bursting to come out. When the real you finally does come out, it’s unnatural to the other person. Where they may have been cool with you for who you were in the beginning there’s now only an uncomfortable feeling and a sense of betrayal. They’re left wondering who you really are.

Far better to be honest and be yourself, whoever that is, from the beginning. If they’re not cool with that, then it was never meant to be. You both save a lot of time trying to impress one another and can get on with finding the people who you can be comfortable around and just be you. Learn, change, grow, but always be true to you.