Please don't "just be yourself."

I’ve been thinking quite a lot about relationships and how they change us, and today I want to riff a bit on that. I often hear variations of the idea, “I am who I am and that’s that.” It shows up a lot in our highly individualistic world, and it appears to make a lot of sense. Sometimes it sounds like this: Just be yourself! Other times, it sounds triumphantly defiant: I won’t let anyone change me.

Both of these statements have power and can be wonderfully empowering in certain situations. They make sense in a highly individualistic paradigm, which is largely what we are living in. But the flaws in this way of understanding ourselves are showing in so many critical ways in our world right now that our hand is really being forced. I see more and more of us realising that it’s just ridiculous to think only of ourselves, our singular identities, our nation, our part of the world and to pretend that we are not irrevocably bound to one another in so many ways, conscious and unconscious. We are learning just how inextricably intertwined with each other – that everything is connected.

I have loads to say about this because I’ve thought about it a LOT over the last few years, but for today I’m going to focus on one key idea:

Who we are as individuals is not who we are in relationship. We change and are changed by other people.

We are not “just ourselves” wherever we go. Or, we are, but who we are changes and morphs depending on who we are in contact with, and how. We change when we interact with other people – and this is exactly how it’s meant to be!

Carl Jung put it so beautifully:

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”

Some people bring out the best in us, while others… well, have you ever been around someone where you found yourself feeling batshit crazy? I know my hand is up right now. Something happens when we come together with other people. We don’t just stay statically ‘who we are’. We change are changed by people.

I have heard some people say in the past that they are the same person wherever they go, and I have, in the past, admired and even revered them a bit for being able to be like this. To not feel compelled to bend and twist yourself into a form that you think will be pleasing or will fit in with others – that’s powerful. To feel comfortable in who you are regardless of who you’re with is a hard won gift. But there’s something overly simplified about this statement for me. It overlooks both the context and the fact that people have different effects on us depending on who they are, who we are when we’re with them, and a multitude of other factors.

I feel like I’m not quite able to get to the nub of this idea today. It’s like I’m dancing just around the edge of it.

But I know that I DO change depending on who I’m with, and that there’s nothing wrong with that. I am more polite in some situations, more formal in others, more triggered by some people than others, less on guard around others than some. With certain people I am likely to be silly, or say the wrong thing, or feel uptight, or, or, or.

We do not exist behind non-permeable walls that the outside world cannot penetrate. Well, perhaps some people do; I would argue that it is likely that these people have possibly erected such strong defences against being affected by others that they are isolated to the point of not being healthy.

We are interdependent beings. Even those of us who refuse to ever depend on another person for their psychological needs is absolutely critically dependent on other people for survival: it is people who make our clothes, build our homes and the furniture within them, grow our food, pave our roads, produce the hundreds of products and services we use, and run the many organisations and corporations that pretty much run the world we live in. None of us are solely self-sufficient. Writing this paragraph reminds me of the film, Into the Wild. If you haven’t seen it, you must! It is wonderful and sad.

Personally, I want to be changed by people and the world around me. Imagine living a life where music didn’t move you, theatre and art didn’t make you think, where you were a biological equivalent of a four-limbed piece of Teflon. There are times when the catchphrase from one of my favourite drag queens from RuPaul’s drag race, Jinx Monsoon, is needed: “Water off a duck’s back.” There are times that call us to be unwaveringly, fiercely anchored in who we are, to not bend or sway or change one little bit – especially as women, and especially in these times. But to not let yourself be changed by the world around you? To me that idea is just so tragic.

So please don’t “just be yourself.” I hope you have people in your life around whom you can deeply relax and let go, people you don’t have to perform for or be artificial around. I hope you feel safe enough to trust that all the different parts of you are welcome, especially in the relationships that sit at the centre of your life. But to just be yourself, as if there is only one side to you? To proliferate the idea that being yourself is so simple that the only adverb it needs before it is a ‘just’? I’m not on board with that idea anymore. Sometimes it feels really fucking hard to be yourself – and with good reason.

Instead, here’s to being changed by the people around us, and to acknowledging that our presence in theirs changes them in ways untold too. Here’s to exploring and discovering and experimenting and playing with a thousand ways of being. And here’s to relationships – to the ones that make us feel crazy and teach us so much about what we don’t want, and to the ones that feel like home and show us what we have wanted all along.

(Image credit: Alex Contradiev via Unsplash. Thank you, Alex.)