by Miche McNally

Created on: January 08, 2008

We are told daily all that we need to improve within ourselves. Physically, mentally, emotionally. From birth we are assigned certain expectations to measure ourselves by and to try and fit ourselves within. We are trained, our inner mechanics programed, to keep these expectations as a map for all future discourses and decisions. This is the mask that we are given. This is the mask that so many of us wear on a daily basis.

We are barraged minute by minute with commercials, all campaigning for some spot in our mind, though with a tenuous grasp, that it might shape us just a little this way, or perhaps a little that way. You must be beautiful. You must be strong. You need a new car, new makeup new shoes. You must be able to sing, to dance, to put on a show and to do everything that cannot be done by the masses of other trained monkeys for the purposes of "personal goals", all the while staying closely within the constraints put upon you. Basically, you must be everything they want you to be, except what you really are. Yourself.

I say self improvement is a phrase thrown around to liberally.It has been given an emptiness by the action of over use that may not hold the capacity of counteraction. There is no "improvement" intended in this so publicly paradoxical process. Only derision and declension, a metaphorical bowing out to what they say we should be. In a land run by the dollar sign and a certain sense of desensitization, there is no room for actual self improvement. Besides which, self improvement in itself, actual personal evolution, can only be attained by dropping the fallacious tendencies and inclinations that have henceforth defined self improvement. Simply put, forget who they say you should be and who they have sold you as. Forget the lies they've told you, the anger that has been embedded within you, the insecurities. Forget the things that they have used thus far to build you up into something that needs improvement, and see only what is truly there. By this, you will be much improved upon by becoming nothing more than what you actually are. Your self. I say that is an improvement.

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