Brave

No one should ever try to “downgrade” themselves just because the people around them can’t handle it. You should embrace who you are — that’s what they say, “accept your flaws, embrace your flaws.” But what about your gifts? You should be allowed to embrace the positive aspects of yourself without feeling guilty about it. As long as you are a nice and respectful person, there is no shame in feeling good about yourself. Unfortunately, society conditions us to feel bad about ourselves.

Certainly, cockiness and arrogance is dangerous. But there is a great difference. There’s a difference between assuming you are untouchable vs. having hope that you won’t break with the knowledge that it’s very possible. There’s a difference between claiming you know everything vs. trusting your intuition with the knowledge that delusion is still a possibility.

So just because someone may come off as confident does not mean that they aren’t full of doubts and fears that haunt them all the time. It’s easy to be intimidated by others but it’s foolish to assume that they think less of you. In fact, there’s a great chance that the person you are intimidated by is actually twice as intimidated by you. We all express ourselves in different ways and it’s unfair to make assumptions about someone’s behavior.

It’s very, very, very sad that all of us humans have been conditioned since birth to have low self-esteem, or to feel guilty about having high self-esteem. For sure, it has a lot to do with keeping the economy going — insecurity makes you buy more things that you don’t need — more makeup, plastic surgery, more clothing, fancy cars, or anything else that’s shiny and boosts your ego. But I think it’s even more than money. It’s simply the human condition.

It’s so difficult to accept that someone has love for you that you overthink and overanalyze their words and actions until you have fully convinced yourself that it’s all in your head. Most people, you could literally write it in the sky that you think they are so beautiful and special, and they still won’t believe you. They will paint you as a vicious liar who’s “messing with you” or “won’t leave you alone” when in reality they are just trying to get it through their brain that YES, YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL AND SPECIAL! I know a lifetime of being conditioned to hate yourself makes it hard to believe, but IT’S TRUE! It doesn’t matter how loud you yell it, some people still can’t hear it.

So what to do? Downgrade yourself and diminish your worth just so you can put a little bit of color in someone’s black heart? No. What you should do is this: continuing being brave, and if you’re lucky, that bravery will spread like a virus and whoever felt nervous of you will catch that bravery and finally understand how incredible they really are!

I think that if everyone in this world was super confident then we would all freely love and support one another without envy or fear of rejection. Confidence makes the world a better place (but not cockiness, there is a difference). So don’t let other people steal your shine. If someone is so nervous of you that they can’t see how much you truly adore them, and everything you do to show them your appreciation of them somehow gets twisted around into something negative, well then you just have to continue being brave.