Anyone content with being themselves?

Post Reply New Topic

I feel content with being myself. But I just wish my difficulties with office politics would be better understood, accepted and accommodated by NTs.

Generally I feel content with who I am. Now that is, because I didn't use to.

I am changing, but at my own pace (which I have noticed is slower than others). Meaning its not a forced change to try and fit in better, its the type of change that occurs when you grow and gain new experiences over time, which inevitably causes changes within yourself even if they are subtle. I am content with this, now that I have learnt that it is easier to go with these types of changes rather fight them.

Anyway, after a fair bit of thinking over the years, I have come to the conclusion that this is who I am, and if others don't like it then too bad because I am me and not them!
Why should I have to play a part that I know is not actually who I am underneath just for their benefit. Because they don't seem to do that for my benefit.

One thing that helped me come to this conclusion was that my friends do think I'm a bit weird, (I know because they've told me), but for some reason I felt O.K. I guess it was because they weren't saying it in a mean way, which made me think that: well they still are my friends so maybe its alright to be different because there are some people out there who accept me for who I am.

For me, the break came when i was sixteen.

I was at this thing called a Rainbow gathering, which is alike a massive hippie camp out with a couple 10,000 people. I had always had long hair, and used to do this shaking-hand thing, so I attached a drum to my backpack and handflapped it all the time, so people wouldn't keep asking me why I was doing that with my hand. So when the hippies met me, some of them liked me, and I ended up going down to this gathering.

On July 4th, some people who didn't seem to like me (I hadn't met them before) started throwing rocks at me and calling me names and telling me to leave. After taking a few egg-sized rocks to the face, I decided that I would leave. I was too embarassed and beat-up looking to go home and explain YET ANOTHER SOCIAL FAILURE, so I went deeper into the woods.

It was july 4th or so when I went into the woods, and August 10 when I came back out. Not a soul knew where I was in the interim. I saw no one, spoke to no one, and had no gear other than my clothes and a knife.

It was SO EASY to live like that. There was no social interaction, and no need for it. No demand to produce words, no music playing, all the food was very simple, no giant hunks of glass and steel called cars hurlig past at unnatural speeds. Just the original world.

That's when I realized, or decided, that my mind was made for the original world, and everyone else's mind was made for the messed-up botch job that humans made of it. Life made a lot more sense after that. But i have felt vindicated ever since.

i would never change myself

My problem is a bit different. I don't even know what my "self" is. In the past I never even really thought about what my role in life was. For me fitting in with people was always more of a means than an end. I like individual people but I have little innate desire to identify with cliques or forms of social status. I try to act "normal" in public to get by but it's my private thoughts that really determine who I am in my own mind. Basically I live in my head so much that I don't even really know what I am to other people.

Maybe I'm lying a little though if I said I completely don't care about fitting in with society. I do feel like I want to be noticed and appreciated but every thing I can think of that other people use to accomplish this goal seems unnatural and, for lack of a better term, phony to me. Why I feel like this is a bit of a mystery to me. Even if I thought about trying to fit in I wouldn't know where to begin. Nobody seems really similar to me, not even the people on the spectrum I've met. Awkward probably sums up how I feel about life in general.

Who else could I be?
No, seriously. At best I would be myself pretending not to be myself. That would suck.
I confess to not reading the thread, so if this is a repeat, my apologies.

When I was around 12, I concluded that if I tried to be what others wanted, I would fail, so instead of trying, I would be myself. And since then I've always in one sense been content with being myself. That is, I chose to be myself, and I was content with that choice.

On the other hand, there was a part of me I didn't like, a part of me I've thought of as Little Girl, the part of me with autistic traits, I now realize. So, in a different sense, not content with being myself, not content with that part of me being part of me.

In the past few years, I've came to get to know, and to accept, this part of me. I'm not happy being who I am in both senses.

I do have, and have had in the past, the desire to improve myself, to grow as a person. Not to change who I am, but to become a better me.

This thread is invalid. Do we have a choice?

Not really, but some of us come to terms with the way we are better than others.

Now that I have been to me...topic

Weird title. What I mean is that when I stopped seeing everything negatives and saw the positives, I realized that being myself is a good thing. When a person grows in confidence, it shows to others that different is good.