Let’s talk for a minute about the people in our lives. What I mean by this is not people like family, which you are born into and don’t have any control over. Rather, I am speaking about the people we consciously and willingly let have a presence in our lives. These are the people we choose to allow to stay in our lives. While they are mainly colleagues and friends, I have recently reached the painful conclusion that we have a tendency to look over someone. This particular someone is arguably the most important someone in our lives – me, myself and I.
The self is and will always remain the most important person in our lives, it is the person we literally see staring back at us in the mirror every morning and similarly, it is the person that we have to make peace with every single day, and the latter is particularly hard.
Are you happy with yourself? Do you like yourself? Many a times we, and myself included, look at our lives in terms of where we are in our careers, education and the achievements that we have reached. Honestly, I am also guilty of thinking in this pattern. I measure my happiness against a where I am in my life versus who I actually am. I give more weight to external factors, many of which are above and beyond my control, than I do to the internal ones that actually make the most difference in terms of who I am and how I feel.
The point of all this is the fact that you should be the person you want to be. It is time that we measure our happiness against who we are and not what we have. My mother has a test, when she meets someone new she always asks herself: Would I be friends with them if I met them on the street? I guess the big question is: Would you be friends with you if you met yourself on the street? Be the person you would want to be friends with because at the end of the day, it is just you.
— The reader is an Emirati event coordinator based in Dubai
