Live Your Own Life
The Art and Science of Being Yourself
All your life, you're told who and what to be.
From "It's a boy!" or "It's a girl!" on, other people make assumptions, decisions and demands about your identity and behaviour.
It's the work of a lifetime to resist the constant tide of ideas about who you ought to be, and become who you really are: to live your own life.
When I was a kid, I didn't make many of my own decisions. Most kids don't: you eat what you're given, wear what is bought for you, live where you're told to live. As a kid, the decisions I did make were mostly motivated by what would make the adults around me happy. My role in the family was to make people happy and not cause trouble.
Through my childhood and early adulthood, that one principle guided me: What decision will make people — especially my parents, but everyone if possible — happy with me?
A series of unfortunate decisions resulting from that principle led me, at 22 years old, to a grey desk in a windowless room in a suburban low-rise office building, running test after test of software which was meant to let office workers create and fill in forms. It was uninspiring work, made worse by my utter lack of interest in being good at it. And so, instead of running those tests, I was reading websites about fat liberation.
I was fat — I still am — and when I was 22 I thought that that meant I couldn't do "regular" things. Things like travelling, riding horses, going skiing, exercising, having great sex, getting massages, going to a spa, being cute, being powerful, and so much more. I thought that maybe, one day, I would be able to do those things — if I ever got thin.
The websites about fat liberation that I read when I was supposed to be working told a different story. They said that fat people could live their own lives as they were, without waiting until they're thin. That message changed my life.
A few months later, I quit the form-testing job, packed my bags and backpacked my way through Europe for four months.
If this were an airport memoir, that trip would have changed me and everything would have been different and perfect ever since. That's not what happened.
I arrived home sweaty and exhausted and in debt, and mooched around for a while to "think about things". My thinking didn't get me anywhere, and eventually I took another low-level grunt tech job, hoping, I guess, that this time would be different. I had *that* job for four years before I quit to stay home with my first baby.
Since then, I've done plenty of things: had children, done volunteer jobs, worked for myself, worked for other people, taken courses and programs, got certifications, been married, been separated. All the time, I've been slowly learning who I am and what it takes to be me.
This website is not about a big epiphany, or one amazing trick you need to do to make your life complete. I didn't live, love, laugh my way to Asia and back and now my life is great and I'll tell you how to do the same.
What I did — what I'm still doing — is made little changes, medium-sized changes, and occasionally, big changes, which get me closer to knowing myself and being myself.
I got another, deeper lesson from those fat liberation websites. I learned that I have agency: I can make choices in my life. I'm not resigned to living my life in response to what other people expect.
This website is my attempt to pay that lesson forward. It's about what I've learned and what I'm still learning.
It's a struggle to be yourself in a world that asks you to be something else. But it's worth it.
Why Live Your Own Life?
If living your own life is such a struggle, why bother?
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
— Henry David Thoreau
Whether literally true or not (I doubt Thoreau did a representative survey, and how much is “the mass” anyway), that quote resonates. I know I have felt that quiet desperation, when I was cooped up in airless office buildings doing tedious work, or trapped in a house in charge of two small children, feeling alone and forgotten.
That might be the single most powerful reason to live your own life: to escape the quiet desperation. If you know yourself — know what moves you, inspires you, makes you feel competent and purposeful, makes you feel yourself — and you create a life that embraces yourself, the desperation fades away.
That doesn't mean all your problems go away — you'll still have to line up for things and floss and do laundry and take certification exams and be polite to people you don't like. But your problems will make more sense and be more tolerable when you're living your life with meaning and purpose.
A second reason to live your own life is because the truest version of you is the version with the most to give. If you are free to dress how you want, create how you want, and be how you want, you can express yourself more fully, create more authentically, be kinder and more generous, be more you.
It isn't about about achieving or improving or optimizing yourself. You don't have to do more or be better, unless you want to be. It's about uncovering, embodying and embracing your true self. It's about relaxing into who you are and releasing the struggle to be what others want you to be.
Finally, living your own life inspires others to do the same. Whenever you can live freely as yourself in public — on a subway car or at the grocery store or on social media — you're giving permission and example to other people who are yearning to break out of their own quiet desperation.
You being you is the greatest gift you can offer the world.
Those are my top three reasons why you should live your own life. But how?
How to Live Your Own Life
There are only two steps to living your own life:
Know yourself
Be yourself
So simple — and so difficult.
You can know yourself in lots of different ways: conversations with therapists, coaches, friends, and other trusted people; journalling; experiments and observation; sudden bursts of insight during long walks or in the shower; and more.
To be yourself follows on from knowing yourself. That's where you put your discoveries and ideas into practice. Being yourself takes imagination, persistence, patience, courage, and compassion. It also takes strategy, planning, structure, and support.
But actually, the process loops around:
Know yourself
Be yourself
GOTO 1
When you try something new, you'll learn something new. That informs what you do next, and so on, forever.
Living your own life is endless. It's the work of a lifetime. I've had many conversations with people in their seventies and eighties who are still discovering new things about themselves, learning and trying things. This isn't meant to be discouraging. In fact, I think it's quite wonderful — you'll never be bored on this journey!
Two Notes of Caution
Before we go on, I want to introduce two caveats.
First, personality is not fixed. I know I've made it sound like there's some True You deep inside, buried in the muck of social expectations and rules, and all you have to do is find it. The reality is more complicated than that.
Your personality can change over time. Who you are now isn't who you were ten or twenty years ago. You've learned things, forgotten things, shed habits and developed new ones. Your interests, priorities, and even your values have changed.
This is good news, though; it means you don't have to be anxious about figuring yourself out "correctly" or trying to rationalize how you've changed over time. You don't have to make sense of the weird choices you made in your twenties. All you can do is learn to listen to yourself and discover what's true for you now.
The second caveat is that who you are will always be a dance between you and the world. No-one is a rock, no-one is an island. There's no True You that exists in a vacuum. You're molded by society — which is part of the problem, but the solution doesn't involve becoming detached from society.
Living your own life is about negotiating the balance between who you are and who you need to be in society. The default is weighted heavily on the side of social expectation, but there is often more possibility to be yourself than it seems at first.
Alfred Adler talks about separation of tasks, the idea of understanding what is your responsibility and what is not. For example, it's not your responsibility to not upset the neighbours by wearing a scandalously short skirt. Your responsibility is to dress in a way that delights and expresses who you are. Your neighbours' feelings and opinions about how you dress are their responsibility.
(A lot of my examples are apparently about being a working-class girl in the north of England in the sixties. I'm sorry, I can't explain it myself.)
Within this dance between you and the world, it's important be aware of the systemic forces which influence what the world asks you to be. Society doesn't just want you to be a certain way on a whim; there’s a kind of invisible conductor leading the dance.
Listen past those beats of "you oughtta" and "you should" and you'll hear the discordant clash of capitalism, colonialism, misogyny, racism, and more. Understanding these forces, which are the context in which we all exist, is the secret Step 1.5 of the Live Your Own Life recipe.
It's important to know about these systems for two reasons: first, you can stop blaming yourself when you can't seem to get traction ("impostor syndrome" who?); and second, you can make an informed choice about whether to work within the system, or work to refuse it.
How to Start
There's no right place to start; you can begin wherever you are. When I coach, my clients and I often start by exploring their strengths and values — that's as good a place as any. (More links to come!)
1. Know Yourself
Learn your strengths. Your strengths are with you always, and knowing what they are will help, whether you're starting something new or facing unexpected adversity.
Learn your values. Putting your values into words can help you develop a stronger sense of who you are, learn what drives you, make decisions, and stay true to yourself when times get tough.
Take a goofy personality test. (That link is rightly skeptical of MBTI and Enneagram but approving of the Big 5, but even the Big 5 is in question. Personality tests can be fun, but take them with a grain of salt.)
Journal for self-awareness (or try something else if journalling is not for you).
1.5. Know the Context
Recognize the difference between systemic obstacles and internal ones.
Remember that everything is invented — by which I mean, most of the rules we live by, and even assumptions that go so deep that we don’t question them — are created by someone. That means we can make a choice about whether we abide by them or not.
2. Be Yourself
Use routines and rituals to make things easier and to establish new habits.
Be self-compassionate in the face of setbacks and failure.
Keep trying.
Thank you for reading!
I hope you found something valuable here. If so, I invite you to subscribe to my monthly newsletter to find out when I post something new, for updates on my coaching, and lots of great recommendations.
And keep going on your journey to live your own life. Living true to yourself is the best gift you can give to yourself and to the world. 💖