How to Become the Image of Your Imagination

Written by Stefan Petrovski, Macedonia

The most important thing in life would be how you perceive yourself, how you can translate the image of your mortal being into the physical world. As human beings we are exposed to various things that attempt to shape our personality, our behavior and our image and perception of our own selves. We are constantly pushed into a box by exterior forces that are not our identity. To be yourself in this world is the most powerful thing you can ever be, to have the strength and audacity to walk out the door and show the world your true colors, this is true strength.

You’re probably finding yourself in the predicament of questioning your authenticity, whether you are shining with your own colors or you’re being influenced and shaped by outer forces. I’ve met countless people who follow the crowd and go with the flow, for me these people generally don’t feel true, they feel shaped and developed like images in the ideas of others. This generally occurs in schools, teenagers find themselves pressured by their fellow peers because they find importance in being accepted, in fitting in with society that wants them to be something other than what they actually are. And if they do behave like themselves they are generally excluded and are looked at as the black sheep of the crowd. This adaptation you might call it occurs due to fear, the fear of exclusion, the fear of not being wanted or loved.

This is the reason why people even to this day face identity issues and suffer from anxiety and in many cases depression. We live in a world where difference isn’t accepted and encouraged but put on the spotlight and observed like bacteria under a microscope. And if we do get put in the spotlight for being ‘weird’ we are faced with hate speech.

Everyone has encountered hate speech in their lives and surely has been a target of it in a less or more severe form. Whether you were targeted for your religion, your sexuality, your gender, your politics, your color, your language, or any of the things that this world deems important it is crucial to remember that difference is uniqueness and uniqueness is every human being.

How do you protect your identity, how do you shield yourself from the things that try to put strings on you and control you? One of my absolute favourite people in this world devotes his life to being the ‘black sheep’ of society and he’s said and done a lot of beautiful things to promote uniqueness and weirdness:

“When you become the image of your own imagination it’s the most powerful thing you could ever do” – RuPaul

I find this quote deeply satisfying and inspiring because it speaks to every human who has been touched by the bitterness of this world. Out of personal experience what I’ve done, and keep doing to this day is attract people who make me feel good about being myself and have no regrets in distancing myself from people who do the complete opposite to me, for in the end it’s not worth trying to offer yourself to people who don’t see you with the same eyes as you see them.

Remember, be yourself and if people put you in a box, get out of it and put yourself in your own box, decorate it however you wish and don’t take any suggestions, it’s your box and not anyone else’s. Finally, I’ll leave you with this quote and give you something to think about

“Learn to love yourself, because if you can’t love yourself, how the heck are you going to love somebody else” – RuPaul