“I grew up with a lot of dreams
Plans who to be
None of them, none were mine” – Tove Lo

Everything seems easier from the outside looking in. People my age spend a lot of time on Facebook looking at the lives of our friends wondering how they have it so easy. We see couples that we look up to and we wonder how they make it seem so effortless.

But it’s not.

We each have our inside lives and our outside lives, and the outside lives are so much shinier and happier. It’s the face you put on around parents, at school, at work, to your friends who you haven’t seen in a while. Or friends you just aren’t that close to.

And while it’s you, it’s also not you. Other people don’t see the internal struggles you face. They don’t know how many hours you’ve spend preoccupied by something someone said to you. They don’t know about fights with your significant other or the fact that you put on 4 different outfits before choosing one you finally didn’t hate.

As a disclaimer, I’m not saying all of these things are me. In the last few years, my outside self has become much, much closer to my inside self than it used to be. But it was a struggle to get there. It’s a struggle because there’s so many things you’re told you’re supposed to want. You’re told how you “should” be by people who are just repeating what they’ve been told. And there’s shame when you don’t feel like that, or when you don’t want to feel like that. A lot of shame.

So you put on your outside face. You step into a persona that is you-but-not-you and you hide away the things that don’t fit in with other people’s idea of how you should be. You generally let a few people in on your inside life, sometimes. But somehow you think that you’re the only person living this inside life. Like if you tell someone about it, if you really, truly open up, and it might be shocking to them. Too much to handle. Too much you so that they will turn away.

It’s all a big fucking lie.

There is no way you’re supposed to be. There is no right path for someone your age, with your background, and your gender. Feeling shame over something you know you feel is a pointless exercise in frustration. You will never be entirely happy until you simply allow yourself to be who you are, all the time. I feel the pressure to have an ‘inside’ life sometimes but I don’t want one. 

It’s not because I want nothing to be private; it’s because by splitting your life in two you’re saying that some of it is wrong. That it’s unacceptable and needs to be hidden. But it’s not. And it’s ok to let people see you struggle. It’s ok to ask for help, it’s ok to be broken, and it’s ok to be different. It’s ok to not want something that most of society thinks that you should want.

So ask yourself sometimes, are you living two lives? Are you putting on a person suit for people in your life and denying something you know to be true about yourself? If so…maybe try just being yourself instead. You’re real self. It’s often not as scary as you think.