Doodle Card #95 – Make Every Effort To Just Be Yourself

Make every effort to just be yourself.

 

Make every effort to just be yourself.
自分自身であるために、あらゆる努力をしよう。

 

“You need to study much harder than others to be better.”

My mother kept telling me. Since I was six or seven years old. She bought me many kinds of study materials although my family was struggling financially.

Thanks to my mother, I was the smartest kid in junior high school. But only on paper. Even when I got a perfect score, I struggled with self-doubt. I wouldn’t be recognized as a good kid if I didn’t get a perfect score. Probably my mother didn’t intend to make me feel that way, but that’s what I thought.

Right before I went to college, my mother was hospitalized. She couldn’t come back home since then.

I don’t know what my mother thought in hospital. My mother was unable to speak. But I saw her working hard on being alive although her disease was incurable. Between life and death, she worked really hard to just be herself — not even a daughter, a sister, a wife or a mother. I believe that she made it. Even if no one else recognized that.

After spending twenty-one years in a hospital bed, my mother passed away.

Then I quit trying to be better than someone else. No matter how hard I work on, there’s always someone who is better than me in this world. Instead I continue working hard to just be myself. Not to be like someone else.

Sometimes I still struggle with self-doubt, but it’s different from what I had before. Because my life is no longer conditional. The way my mother lived in a hospital bed is now my DNA.

 

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