Every week we as people put in time at work, put in time at school, with friends, pretending to be who we aren't; but how many people actually take the time to wind down and be ourselves? We are a society of people that wear a lot of masks, but hardly take the time to pull off these masks and be able to breathe for the first time in weeks. It can be hard to sit here and have to deal with everything without ever taking the time to stop and think about what is truly going on in our own heads, and this can cause us to feel like we've become lost in ourselves and can really begin to lose the sense of who we are as a whole. Moving beyond the stages of realizing that we don't take enough time to be ourselves can really help us gather the strength to be ourselves every single day.

Being your authentic self every day, week in and week out can seem like an extremely difficult thing to accomplish, but there is no better feeling that being ourselves. Try giving yourself a set amount of time each week to unwind, and you'll see how much your life can improve in a short amount of time. It'll improve in such a way that will become addicting and you'll start to notice parts of your inner self that you never knew that you had hold of. Learning to be myself was one of the hardest things that I've ever really decided to do, and yet it was one of the most liberating things that I've done. Giving yourself time to think, especially when you have a mental illness, can be an extremely rough thing in the beginning. However, eventually, everything will work out in ways that you never really thought.