Why Becoming Yourself Is Painful ► Explained With Dark Souls

Have you ever felt like there are two different versions of you? One is genuine and authentic and inside of you, how you really feel. But the other one is almost like a disguise. It’s the version that keeps up appearances and just doesn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. And the problem is that whenever one of these versions of you wins, the other one suffers. If you want to make sure everyone else is comfortable, then you betray yourself.

But if you act according to how you truly feel, now you risk judgment and conflict and rejection and embarrassment, right? You get stuck in this limbo where you’re not fully yourself, but you’re not happy either. I thought I would stay stuck trying to fix this impossible problem forever, but then I played the game Dark Souls and it made me realize something. Your new life is going to cost you your old one. The habits, mindsets, beliefs about yourself

That have gotten you this far in your life won’t take you any further. And that’s why the first step in becoming yourself is actually knowing where and how you want to end up. If you don’t know where you want to go, then how will you ever get there? You’ll just default to the person you were before again. Once you know where you want to go and what you want to do, the only thing left to do is do what it takes to

Get there. You can’t keep being the same old you and expect a whole new life. Something has got to change. In the game Dark Souls, you walk through the game not really knowing where you’re going, but then you come across a boss and you try to fight it and you die. So you run back to the boss and you die again. You die again and again and again until you realize that, okay, what I’m doing right

Now is not working. Now it’s time to switch up the strategy. And that means that instead of just trying to face the boss’s moves blindly again like you have been doing, maybe you got to do some runs where, you know, like you know you’re going to die, but that doesn’t matter because the purpose of these runs is to just analyze and learn the boss’s moves. And that’s going to hurt. It’s going to hurt your poor little character

In the game getting smashed over the head a bunch of times and not even fighting back, but it’s also going to hurt your ego because nobody wants to go in expecting to lose, expecting to die. But if your current strategy has not been working either, you’ve got to make a change. You’ve got to try something different. It’s almost like you need to forget everything you’ve learned before this point and learn something totally new in order to beat the boss

This time. This is the most effective way to beat a boss in Dark Souls. I’ll admit it’s also the most boring. Even I enjoy just going blindly into a fight and trying to just smack down on the boss with my big ass dragon slayer great sword, even if I keep losing. I don’t care. But sometimes the boss is just too tough. And if you want to beat it and not keep sinking time into the game, then you need to admit to yourself that

You can’t beat it the way you’re trying to right now. And you need to forget the techniques you may have learned from other bosses and be willing to die over and over again and try to learn the new boss’s move set. And this is where I think that a lot of people kind of misunderstand the game Dark Souls. The goal of Dark Souls isn’t to just beat the boss. The goal, the philosophy of Dark Souls overall, is that the game is

Trying to change you. And the game will only keep punishing you if you refuse to learn the new way to beat the boss. And one of the ways the game punishes and teaches you is through your souls. Souls are like a currency in the game. You collect souls by killing enemies and you can use them to level up your character and buy things. When you first accidentally run into a boss fight arena, you probably have a bunch of

Souls on you. Maybe you just cleared an area, maybe you were saving them to level up. But now when you enter the boss room, you’re not just thinking about beating the boss. You’re also thinking about not losing your souls. And that changes how you play the game. Now you’re nervous and you’re trying to survive instead of trying to learn. When you have everything to lose, it’s hard to take a step back and be relaxed and try to learn. It’s too

Stressful. Either you spend all your souls before the boss fight or the boss kills you and then you try to go back and retrieve your souls and then you die again and now they’re all gone forever. And yeah, I know that sucks. But then something changes inside of you right after this unfortunate loss happens. You lose all your souls, but now suddenly you feel like free. Now there’s nothing left to protect. Now when you walk into the boss room, you don’t care

If you die anymore. That’s actually when you finally start learning the boss and become able to beat it. You’re not trying to protect something anymore. Playing the game from a place of scarcity, now the game is just fun again and trial and error. Doesn’t even matter what happens. You’re finally just focused on improving and that’s when we enter a kind of flow state, a level of focus that makes you forget to even blink. Because you had so much on you,

So much to lose, you were afraid of ever even trying anything new. Because why would you? It’s way too risky. And this same thing happens in real life when you’re trying to act or become more like yourself. I don’t think the problem is you’re afraid of being yourself. I think the problem might be that you’re afraid of losing something. Approval, friendships, opportunities, the image people have of you. So you keep acting the same way you’ve always

Been, safe and careful and just trying not to lose your souls. But eventually you realize something. If you keep protecting the life you already have, the one that you’re not even happy with, you’ll never become the person you’re meant to be. The moment you lose all your souls is the moment you stop playing scared. You think becoming yourself is about adding confidence, but a lot of the time it’s actually about losing the need to protect that old

Version of you. One of the most painful parts of actually becoming your true self, you feel worse before you start to feel better. A lot of people never actually become themselves because they’re too attached to already being competent and experienced as the person they are now. The old you already knows how to survive and fit in with your group of friends and avoid rejection. But the real you might have to become a beginner again. And that’s why it’s so

Painful. It’s not just that people might judge you, it’s that the version of you who learned how to survive by pleasing people starts to panic because that version of you thinks approval is safety. It thinks fitting in is surviving. It thinks being liked is the same as being okay. So when you stop people pleasing or stop shrinking yourself or stop acting like the version of you that everyone expects, it doesn’t instantly actually feel good. A lot of times it feels really, really

Awkward. It feels like you’re terrible at socializing and you don’t know what to say and you don’t know who’s a good match for you anymore. You really don’t know anything. You’re like a baby. The old you already knew how to survive, but the new you has to learn to live again. You’re not in the safe area anymore. When you’re in the middle of changing, in the process of changing, it usually doesn’t feel like an actual improvement

To your life. It just feels like so awkward. It feels like you’re losing friends, losing people in your life, always second-guessing yourself, and not even knowing if you’re becoming more of yourself or making your life worse. It doesn’t feel like growth. It feels like a loss. Loss of certainty, approval, maybe even loss of relationships. But just like in Dark Souls, you often can’t understand what something was teaching you until much later. Think about the lore of Dark Souls. You don’t

Even need to have played the game to understand what I’m going to tell you right now. But when you play the game for the first time, every line of dialogue from characters and every boss and every item feels like, what the heck is even going on? It all feels super cryptic. I don’t even know what anything is saying. But then if you ever decide to watch a video of like explaining the story of the game, then

You start to piece things together like, oh, that’s why I was doing this and that’s why that character said that. Now it actually makes sense even though before it all felt like nonsense and gibberish and am I even in the right place? You can’t connect the story looking forward. You can only see what was really happening when you look at it backwards, after everything is already said and done. You realize that some of the moments that

Felt like everything was going wrong and it was all a huge mistake, it was actually teaching you something that you were going to need later on. And later on, things will be clear to you and feel like the stars aligned and you realize that maybe nothing is actually bad. Maybe it was just trying to teach you something. And it’ll just take time before you realize how good it really was for you. Dark Souls doesn’t care how

Badly you want to win or how much you play it safe. It only cares whether you’re willing to allow those old habits that you’ve developed from old bosses to get beaten out of you by the new boss. Dark Souls wants to know, can you learn something new even when you feel like you’re fine already as you are? Panic gets punished, greed gets punished, and playing scared also gets punished. And in the same way, life will keep

Punishing the fake people-pleasing version of you until you finally stop protecting it out of fear. And to be fair, that fake version of you doesn’t exist just for no reason. It probably actually helped you survive and avoid conflict. It helped you stay accepted. But surviving isn’t the same thing as living. Surviving is just doing whatever you can to not die. Living means actually being alive and happy and understanding. You don’t act based on what other people want or

Appearances, you act based on how you feel inside. Living is when you stop betraying yourself just to keep things comfortable. When you stop asking yourself, what version of me will make everyone else the happiest? And instead start asking yourself, what do I actually feel is true here? That doesn’t mean becoming rude now. It doesn’t mean you stop caring about people’s feelings either. It just means you stop abandoning yourself. If you spend your whole life protecting a fake version of yourself, then the

Real version of you never really gets to live. Your new life is going to cost you your old one. So who do you actually want to be? Just think about it. Visualize actually who and where you want to be. You’ll realize that actually you’re not that far away from it. And now you just need to practice embodying that person, what that person would do, what that person would say, how that person would feel in a given

Situation, internally true to yourself, and trying to be better. Anyway, that’s everything I have to say for today, guys. If you like Dark Souls and self-improvement, I have a new free community that you can join. It’s just going to be the link in the description. I also have a course inside of that community that’s like how to genuinely fix your life, but like explained with Dark Souls. So, if that sounds interesting to you, then that’s also

Going to be a link in the description. No pressure for either of them, as always, but just if you think that like that sounds interesting to you, then just come check it out, all right? You take care, guys. Don’t you dare go hollow.