How to Be You: Stop Trying to Be Someone Else and Start Living Your Life - Softcover

Marsh, Jeffrey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143110128 ISBN 13: 9780143110125

Verlag: TarcherPerigee, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Too short. Too weird. Too quiet. Not true. Let Internet superstar Jeffrey Marsh help you end those negative thoughts and discover how wonderful you are.
 
An interactive experience, How to Be You invites you to make the book your own through activities such as coloring in charts, answering questions about how you do the things you do, and discovering patterns in your life that may be holding you back. Through Jeffrey's own story of "growing up fabulous in a small farming town"--along with the stories of hero/ines who have transcended the stereotypes of race, age, and gender--you will discover that you are not alone.
 
Learn to deepen your relationship with yourself, boost your self-esteem and self-worth, and find the courage to take a leap that will change your life.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jeffrey Marsh’s spiritual and inclusive messages have received over 400 million views on social media. Jeffrey is a viral TikTok and Instagram star. Jeffrey is the first openly nonbinary public figure to be interviewed on national television, for Unfiltered. Jeffrey was also the first nonbinary author to be offered a book deal with any "Big 5" publisher, at Penguin Random House. Jeffrey’s bestselling Buddhist self-esteem guide How To Be You, is an innovative, category-non-conforming work that combines memoir, workbook, and spiritual advice. How To Be You topped Oprah's Gratitude Meter and was named Excellent Book of the Year by TED-Ed. Jeffrey has been a student and teacher of Zen for over twenty years.

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INTRODUCTION

This book comes straight from the heart. And it aims for the heart too. If I could offer a teeny bit of advice, it’s not to shoot for understanding anything in here, but to shoot for seeing what resonates with what you already understand. I beg you to look for your own truth. What connects with your own life and with the world as you see it? What zaps you right in the heart? I have en­deavored to make so much of this book about your experience. I trust you deeply and I want you to trust your own truth of what we’re going to talk about too. So you’ll notice that each chapter has some kind of fun, challenging, enlightening, and delightful exercise or experience of the topic at hand. We are creating this book together and it is meant to be the manual on how to be you that you didn’t get while growing up. It’s never too late to learn how to live a full happy life as you, and now’s the best time to start.
 
One more suggestion before we get started. Repeat this book. Your understanding of the things in these pages will deepen and grow as you grow, so I’ve made it easy to repeat and reread it every five years or every year or every week. In this book, you will create astounding expressions of who you are, and build your own windows into how the world works. Who wouldn’t want to do that again and again? Why not keep refining your idea of how to be you? So grab your pencil and crayons and enjoy yourself. Before we get into the heavy, joyful stuff, a little bit about me . . .
 
FARMLAND FANTASTIC
 
I grew up poor. By the time I realized the barn could be my theater, our farm was in decline. When I was old enough to help with chores, my fam­ily’s farm was reduced to raising just a few animals and planting two crops: corn and soybeans. Mom had a rural farm joke she liked to tell people she just met: Did you hear that our bathroom caught on fire? Thank God the fire never reached the house! Like any good joke, it’s an exaggeration, but it reveals how far down a dirt road we actually lived. I spent the first few years of my life without a street address and without any idea that there were other people like me (just an occasional mention of the “gay plague” on TV).
 
There was one place where I did feel totally like myself when I was growing up. Before I found community theater, I had a place where I didn’t have to worry about being punished and I could express myself as myself. There was a stage. Footlights. A velvet curtain, a packed crowd. All I needed to do was rearrange a few bales of hay and it would be real. The old barn could be my private dress-up theater. Expressing myself on the farm was always a bit complicated, but when I discovered the raised platform inside our abandoned barn, I could see a safe, private space to explore being a fab ten-year-old. It was a stage for self-expression. I started playing there almost exclusively. To be in that safe space was addictive, all that twirling, dancing, and even singing, feeling secure and whole. There was an old trunk I took from our attic to store odds and ends of skirts and gloves I found in thrift stores or got from friends. The shows were always glittery musical extravaganzas, hours on end of playtime dancing and romancing. While my older brother and his friends went hunting or played football, I brought Vegas to the barnyard.
 
I don’t think Mom and Dad ever did find out about the barn. If they did, they didn’t say. I know raising me couldn’t have been easy. They both had ideas about how life was supposed to be for me, about what the “right” path was for me. Over the years I’ve come to drop the chains of wishing they were my idea of perfect. Maybe all children drag around ideas about how their parents could have done things better. But, of course, we’re all doing our best.
 
At some point, around the time my mom suspected I was wearing her shoes, something became crystal clear: they couldn’t possibly “love me for who I am” if they didn’t know who I was. I realized this when I was eleven. It was time to come out to my mom. As the moment approached to tell her, I pictured myself triumphantly saying, “I have an announcement: I’m from Planet Spectacular! I have come to take over and rule, with Tom Cruise by my side!” All I could muster, though, in a creaking, changing voice, was a stammer that sounded something like “I think I like boys.” There were a million more hidden, beautiful, heavenly, stuffed, and shamed parts of my story, but that tiny sentence would have to be enough for then.
 
Mom hit the brakes. I was scared. She was scared. We were driving home from church; I couldn’t tell if my timing was impec­cable or exceedingly unfortunate. She swerved off the road, perhaps with God on her mind (she was, after all, a Lutheran pastor).
 
“You can’t say that! You’re eleven years old. You don’t know anything about that!” she said.
 
The ideas she had about me, the plans she had for my future, were all changing before her eyes. I would never be her version of the Perfect Son. I can understand how it would be tough to come to terms with that. It would take two more messy “coming out’s” and seven more years of stammering to finally tell Mom that I wasn’t going to be the world’s idea of perfect—that I was going to be me.
 
Let me be clear: Mom loves me. Dad too. My parents are very supportive, even now. Mom has always fought for me. She is one of the strongest, smartest people on the planet. And back then she was told that who I was, how I expressed my gender, was her fault. She was told that this child she loved would lead a disease-riddled, psychologically disturbed, imperfect shell of a life. And without anyone else around to contend that view, it’s not surprising that she spent a lot of time trying to correct what she thought was a terrible mistake.
 
Things did work out for the best. I see the perfection in my life today. Now I “dress up” as my life’s work. I dress up because it’s who I am. Several times a week I’m making glam music videos and sending out little messages of self-worth to millions of viewers. I love interacting with all kinds of people online. Mes­saging with folks who have their own entrenched ideas about being perfect, who wouldn’t normally “get it,” excites me the most. It proves that we’re all more alike than we often admit. Everyone seems to be drawn to this message: there is nothing wrong with you.
 
I am often head over (stiletto) heels happy when someone doesn’t even think about gender identity; they just look at my online presence and see their own goodness reflected back. Because the truth is, my personal journey may be unique to me, but ultimately we all struggle in some way with our sense of self, and when I speak to others, I’m just mirroring for them what they’ve always suspected deep down: they are great just how they are.  

CHAPTER 1: DON’T TRY TO BE PERFECT 
 
Sorry! Perfection doesn’t exist. Whoever taught you what it means to be “perfect” was making it up. Whoever taught them was making it up too. Perfection is a phony concept. It’s a phony set of standards. Where did the standards come from? How did they start? You can’t always be sure where your ideas about how you should be came from, but one thing to notice is that perfection often has a shifting definition. Over time, we as a society change our standards. And,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: TarcherPerigee
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0143110128
• ISBN 13: 9780143110125
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar