Living Without Crutches by Samuel Ufot Ekekere - HTML preview

CHAPTER TEN

THE IDENTITY CRUTCH

Everyone cares about who and what people think about them. Our identity has thus become one of the strongest crutches that we hang on to. There is a tendency in everyone to want to be like the other person who is thought to be doing well. We want to be like the Jonesses who we think are more comfortable and are doing better than we are doing. We want to dress, have the body shape, dance, speak, walk and be accorded some attributes as the other guy is getting. Sadly though that is a crutch that hangs to slow our pace to becoming what we are supposed to be, independent of the other person.

Everyone is born into the world to accomplish a certain task. We don’t all share the same goals or dreams. We carry independent dreams that if we decide to throw them away and look in the direction of the other person, we will be limiting ourselves.

You don’t have to act or do it like the other person to be approved. And why do you have to be approved by the standards set by some other person? You can be a standard for others.

You have an identity that you can also nurture so as to be looked up to by others. When you try to be like others, you lose your originality and much more.

Guess what? When you depend on people to create your identity, you

• Constrain your own capacity to find the real you however hard you try
• Release spasms of doubts around yourself that make you feel you are incapacitated to create the real you
• Unleash the face of the person you are trying to copy. People won’t see you, they see the person you are copying.
• Throw away all the things that make you and accept the junks of others.
• Counter your hearts measure to find the real you and swim in the mediocrity of some other person.
• Highlight the weaknesses of others as being stronger than your strengths. In short, you become blind to your strength.
• Extinct those little virtues of yours that could have shone over time with constant development of your own true identity.
• Silence your strongest voice and accept even the babblings of others standard.

It is vain trying to mold yourself to be seen and appreciated by others while within you; you feel that hurt and know you are not the person you really want to be.

The high rate of suicide especially amongst musicians is because they try to create an identity that they want the public to see them as while losing touch with themselves.

One characteristic with the public is that they easily find a new port to port their high taste while they leave you to waste. To them, your style does not matter longer than they want it to. You thus end up in a cycle of trying to please them which finally ends in your discovering you are out of place

The best for you is to

• Identify your strengths. Find that talent and gift you are very good at
• Dare to discover your weakness. When you know where you aren’t good at, it will help you develop ways to improve yourself.
• Exercise your faith at what you are great at. Always try to believe that you are best at your strengths even if others think otherwise
• Never look down at even your smallest weakness as they could turn out your strength tomorrow.
• Talk about what you can do and less about your weakness. You sell yourself by talking.
• Immediately overlook any talk that is directed towards making you look small before others.
• Think always about putting your problem behind and put those positives ahead
• Yearn towards being the real you. The real you is what the world wants to see.

You don’t have to make other person’s identity become your crutch. You need to drop off those crutches and be yourself.