Those who matter

Speak your mind. Tell your heart. Be yourself.

Who wouldn’t agree with these statements? Probably no one.

How often these exact attitudes and behaviors have led to a better outcome? Rarely.

When can you speak your mind, tell your heart and be yourself? Always.

When should you? A difficult and pivotal question in your social existence. Those who answer it right will surely reach a higher level of peace of mind, and possibly joy.

For some people, these three statements represent their mantra, and they take pride in this way of being. Typically, they are hermits, become ones over time, or they are self-appointed dictators, at different scales.

Everything you say and do or don’t say and do affects in one way or another other everyone who is connected to you in your life. Before speaking your mind, telling your heart, or being yourself, you ought to ask three questions and answer them with the utmost honesty:

1. Why do you need to speak your mind, tell your heart, or be yourself?

2. Who really matters in your life and who doesn’t?

3. How do you behave with those who matter and those who don’t?

To the first question, why do you feel the urge to speak your mind, tell your heart, or be yourself, the answers come in many shapes and forms, but they fundamentally take their source in one place, your ego and they aim to achieve three things:

1. Affirm or impose your personality

2. Be right and most probably, along the way, demonstrate the other is wrong

3. Ask for empathy or admiration

With regards to the second and third questions, who matters in your life, and how to behave with them:

if certain people don’t matter to you, then respectful behavior is good enough. Often, this doesn’t involve speaking your mind, telling your heart, or being yourself. The key focus here is the respect of the other person, so you should stick to that. Respect naturally includes the “don’t-hurt anyone” clause of every good human’s code of conduct.

So, what about those who matter? How should you be with them?

Beyond the respect mentioned above, the answer to this question would be straightforward if everyone was rushing to give from themselves all the good things that matter to the other who matters. In that case, the answer would just be: “follow your giving heart”. Therefore, you can be yourself, tell your heart, and speak your mind.

But this is not how reality looks like! The following is, typically, how things go the wrong way:

The first mistake you usually make is you assume that if the other person matters to you, then you matter to them. It is a highly uncertain, and often false statement. Therefore, it is equally important to ask the mirror question, that you so often forget, maybe because you are afraid of the answer: to whom do you matter? As you answer that question, whatever list of people you end up with, even if it is only one person, you might want to re-assess it, just to make sure that you are being completely honest and realistic about your answer.

Once you have the final list of people who matter to you and you to them, you make another common mistake, you say to yourself: ‘if I matter to the other person then they will do their best to provide me with what I need from them”. Whereas in reality, the overwhelming majority of people will tend to give you what they deem important to themselves and in the way they would like to receive it. They don’t do this purposely. With their ego always standing in the way of their real enlightenment, doing unto you what they would like to be done unto them is an unconscious, egoistic, and very common behavior. They project their own desires, needs, and aspirations on you, because through you, they really care about themselves, rather than about you. In this behavior lies the ultimate expression of how people speak their minds, tell their hearts, and be themselves.

The way out of this impasse is to express to the people who, you think, care for you, what you need from them, and to encourage them to do the same with you. It is not a life-proof guarantee that they would do exactly as expected, but at a minimum, if things don’t change, your knowledge of who understands what you need and deeply cares for you will improve.

If you matter to someone, you would like them:

1. To wish that luck would give you your share of luck

2. To want that you would be fulfilled and happy

3. To desire that joy would stay with you, or come back very quickly when things become tough, and they will at times

4. To bolster your courage to face everyone and everything

5. To help you in building the strength to continue your strife for a better life

6. To ensure that the ties which bind you together would be stronger than their egocentric aspirations.

7. To understand that life, from its beginning to its end, is very questionable if devoid of few truths and values that you and they hold on to, and finally

8. To feel the irresistible need to talk to you frequently, to know how you are doing

It is extremely important for your emotional health and social stability, to regularly answer to yourself, without compromise, three simple and difficult questions: “who matters to you?", "to whom do you matter?” and “how much do they matter to you or you to them?” Often, the only time you can answer this last question unequivocally is when something bad happens to you or them…

With life, people who matter to you disappear and you must live without their presence. At first, you think it is impossible, and then you discover that it is possible. You feel strange about that; how can you still live without this person, but you do and with the passing time you start to find good reasons why you should continue, without them, but for them. You end up believing in your own story, and you carry on living with the conviction that you are fulfilling someone’s wish or dream. But, when you look deep in your souls and you allow yourselves the courage and the audacity to introspect and question your beliefs, you find that you actually continue to live because you love your life, you love it so much that the absence of most people who matter to you will not take that love away, even if it puts it in question for a while. Surely, the departure of certain people makes you stop loving your life, you realize that this latter has no meaning anymore without them, you feel empty and you decide to abandon the struggle because the ones you were struggling for are no more… This is when you know how much people matter to you and in the reverse situation how much you matter to them. This is when you invoke the inseparable companion of the passing time, and you call upon her to welcome you with open arms.

If at some point in your life, no one matters to you anymore or you no longer matter to anyone, then you could start speaking your mind, telling your heart, and being yourself, as you no longer care how other people feel about what you say and do, or no one cares about what you say and do. In either case, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, when you reach this condition of living, you either have become a hermit or a totalitarian dictator, at your own scale, or you are about to take a permanent leave of absence from this life.