The world consists mainly of love slobs who need other people's approval. Most people don't live their own lives very well.
To live a life that is wrong for you is a form of dying. There are people who have lives that look perfect. They try to be happy, they believe they should be happy, they are trying to like it, but if it's off course from their north star, they aren't satisfied.
What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.
I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.
I’m tired of doing what I don’t want to do to live the way I don’t want to live.
If you trade your authenticity for safety, you may experience the following: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, rage, blame, resentment, and inexplicable grief.
Living up to an image that you have of yourself or that other people have of you is inauthentic living.
Like an enemy I knew as intimately as any friend, I came to know the nagging, constant emptiness of the incongruent life. I ignored myself and lived for people, purposes, and goals that weren't my own. I betrayed who I was and instead accepted a fictional substitute that was defined from the outside in.
I had been living the life that society tends to dictate for women of a certain age. You marry the person who asks you, even though he may or may not be the best one for you. Around the time that I got divorced, I had an epiphany that there is no blue ribbon or gold medal for living someone else's life, for fulfilling someone else's dreams. It's doesn't make you happy. You just end up with a life that's not yours.
I'm just - like, I'm just very over the whole superficial life and world we live in.
There are people out there hiding all kinds of things. People who have all this success and all this fame and all this money, and yet there are secrets that they think if we found out about, it would be over for them. And it's a horrible way to live whether you're famous or not.
Trying to live the image of the life which you have in your head... it's really hard not to do that, but I do think maybe it's cheating.
