Care About What Other People Think and You’ll Always Be Their Prisoner — 60 Be Yourself Quotes

Kezia was good at performing. She had been performing for so long that she was not entirely sure where the performance ended and she began. She knew which version of herself to deploy in which room. The competent professional version for work. The easy-going low-maintenance version for her partner’s family. The together-and-fine version for most of her friends. Only in very specific company — two people, maybe three — did she allow something that felt closer to the actual thing.

She described it as a project she was always behind on. Managing perception required constant attention. She was always slightly behind on who needed to see what version of her, always slightly anxious about which version had been shown in which context, always tired in a way she could not attribute to any specific cause because the cause was everywhere all at once.

The shift came slowly, not in a moment. A long conversation with one of the two people who saw the real version — a conversation in which that person said, with some frustration: “I don’t understand why you don’t show this person to everyone else. This is the one I like.” The observation landed differently from anything that had preceded it. Not because it was new information but because it came from someone who had seen both versions and had a clear preference.

She started to let the performance slip in small ways. She said things in meetings she would previously have edited. She dropped the easy-going version with her partner’s family and said a few things that were actually true. She told a friend she was not fine rather than saying she was fine. None of these moments produced the catastrophic consequences she had been avoiding. Several of them produced relief — her own and other people’s.

I had been performing so long I had forgotten it was a performance. I thought I was just being appropriate for the context. What I was actually doing was hiding in every single context I was in. And the cost of that was that I was never fully present anywhere because being fully present requires being fully real. The person I kept for two people could have been for everyone. The performance was protecting me from nothing except connection.

Amara had spent years trying to earn the approval of one person: her mother. Not because her mother was unkind — she was not. But she had a clear picture of who Amara should be: more conventional, more settled, less pursuing the specific path Amara had chosen. Amara had spent her career partly building things she genuinely wanted and partly building the argument for why her choices were valid. She was successful on her own terms and exhausted in a way she could not fully explain to people who had not lived it.

The Lao Tzu quote was the one that reached her. Not when she first read it. She had read it before. It reached her the third or fourth time, on a specific afternoon when she had spent forty minutes composing a message to her mother that would make the path she was taking legible and acceptable. She looked at what she had written and then looked at the quote she had on her wall — care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner — and noticed that she had been a prisoner in the most literal sense.

She did not send the message. She did not stop loving her mother. She stopped needing the approval as a condition of her own confidence.

The quote did not give me permission to stop caring. It described what I was already doing and named it clearly. I was in a prison of my own making. The door was never locked. I had just never tried the handle. Once I understood that the approval I was chasing was never going to arrive in the form I needed — and that my path was not going to change whether or not it arrived — I stopped chasing. I did not stop loving her. I stopped needing her to agree with me as a condition of believing in myself. That is a different thing entirely.