To be like this

I have a handful friends who don't give a dime about what other people think of them. From time to time, they remind me about this fact in the funniest of ways. An old high school acquaintance comes to mind. To this day she's still the same - loud and proud and quick to tell you she doesn't care if you try to rain on her parade. She'll just parade louder.

I'm glad for people like her and yet envious at the same time, as if they've found a slice of life that I haven't been offered yet. Or maybe I've already been offered it and am too afraid to taste the foreignness of it. Maybe it's something I have to develop a taste for.

I am stuck between not caring and caring. I blame it on the people-pleasing side of me.

Shall it rule no more.

I am one who likes paving her own path yet at the same time wonders what people are thinking about me when I do or don't do. Am I too much me? Not enough me?

But that's silly to think - how can you fail at being you?

You only fail when you start listening to everyone else - to the people who haven't really invested in you to begin with, and at the end of the day, could care less. Yet why are their voices the loudest?

I tell myself that the only voices that matter are God and my momma  - and every once in a while not even my momma. A few older mentors in my life matter too. I guess when I get married I can add my husband to that small list. And perhaps his mom - because everybody cares about what the mother-in-law thinks, whether they admit it to themselves or not.