Maybe you shouldn't "just be yourself"
"First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do." — Epictetus
Unpopular opinion, but “be yourself” is the most overrated, cop-out advice in existence.
It sounds wise or liberating, plastered on Instagram graphics and graduation speeches and self-help books. Just be yourself! The right people will love you for who you are! Authenticity is magnetic!
But what if yourself isn’t that great? What if your authentic self is anxious, reactive, undisciplined, and kind of a mess? What if “being yourself” means defaulting to your worst impulses, your laziest habits, and your most unexamined patterns? What if the self you’re supposed to “be” is precisely the thing standing between you and the life you actually want?
“Be yourself” assumes the self is a finished product worth presenting, but for a lot of people, it’s not. It’s a rough draft that needs serious editing.
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I spent most of my twenties “being myself,” and myself was a complete disaster.
Myself drank too much and stayed up too late and couldn’t stick to a routine. Myself was reactive in conversations, saying whatever came to mind without filtering for whether it was useful or kind. Myself had big ideas but no follow-through, plenty of opinions but no discipline, and lots of potential but nothing to show for it.
If I had kept “being myself,” I’d still be that person. Probably worse, actually, because we know habits compound. The version of me that exists now—the one who built a business, who writes regularly, who has her shit mostly together—is not the authentic self I started with. She’s a constructed self. A self I deliberately built because the original wasn’t working.
And I’m not embarrassed by that; I’m proud of it. The construction was the whole point—it is the whole point. I’ll forever be constructing and re-constructing.
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There’s a strange moral weight we’ve attached to authenticity, as if being unfiltered and unedited is inherently virtuous.
“I’m just being real.” “This is just who I am.” “I can’t help it, it’s my personality.” These phrases get deployed as shields against any expectation of growth or change. You’re not allowed to ask someone to be different, because that would be asking them to be inauthentic, and inauthenticity is the cardinal sin of our era.
But this framing is insane when you actually think about it. Should the person with anger issues just keep exploding because that’s their authentic response? Should the chronic interrupter keep interrupting because that’s just who they are? Should the person who’s “brutally honest” keep brutalizing people with their honesty because filtering would be fake?
At some point, “being yourself” becomes an excuse for not improving. It’s a way of locking in your current flaws as permanent features and demanding that everyone else accommodate them. “This is just who I am” really means “I’ve decided not to change, and you have to accept it.”
No. I don’t have to accept it, and neither do you. People can change. People should change.
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Reminder:
There’s a quote often attributed to Oscar Wilde: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” People love repeating it as if it’s profound, but whether Wilde actually said it or not, the irony is rich. Wilde was one of the most deliberately constructed personalities in literary history. The wit, the aesthetic, the public persona, none of that was his unfiltered authentic self emerging naturally. It was a performance, refined over years, designed to create a specific effect.