To Thine Own Self Be True

To Thine Own Self Be True

John Paul Derryberry

If I'm being honest, I didn't get much of Shakespeare when it was required reading. I understood Romeo and Juliet only because who doesn't experience young love through the full emotions of life and death. Society would probably function better if the memories from overreacting to situations when we were young and in love could be erased from our brains. As for the rest of his writing, it went over my head in terms of comprehension. Maybe that has to do with going through school with an undiagnosed minor case of dyslexia, or perhaps it has to do with my lack of attention to detail in school. Either way, William Shakespeare is not something I understood.

Yet, I find myself today thinking about his quote from Hamlet, act I, scene iii, lines 78–80. "This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man." A line a dad speaks to his son about how to interact with the world, and the best way is to be true to ourselves. If we figure out how to stay true to ourselves, we can not lie to any man. The question I have always had about this line is, which version of yourself should you stay true to?

Are we meant to stay true to the wide eye young person who heads off into the world at 18, the idealistic 22-year-old whose morals are unbendable, or the confused 30-year-old asking is really what life is, or the 40-year father thinking about what he will tell his daughters when they head off into the world. Or are we to attempt to stay true to each version of ourselves somehow. We will take the best from the previous versions of ourselves while growing into our new version and still being true to ourselves.

Because if I had stayed true to the full version of myself who bounced off to college 24 years ago, I would not have the beautiful life I do now. Yet there is part of me that the 18-year-old John would say I stayed true to. The part about continuing to challenge the status quo when it doesn't benefit the less fortunate. It's been on my mind as I see many bending in various shapes to support people to the point where we are not being true to ourselves. Compromising, lying to ourselves about the character of the people we follow. Something one of the greatest writers ever specifically left words to us not to do.

I understand that advice is always easier to give than to follow. As someone who now leads many people, I'm losing myself in the countless decisions I have to make. I have navigated that mine field through a constant question that is never far from my thought process. Would every version of John understand what I'm trying to accomplish with this choice? It folds in all the life lessons I have endured; some of those lessons I sought out, some happened to me, and some I brought upon myself. The last thing I want to do is lie to myself; I did for an extended period, and the results were awful. But since I have followed Shakespeare's advice, the result has been something I could wrap my head around or be excellent at, and that's the point of being true to every version of yourself. I lived a life in which, when you look back, I was faithful to all the versions of myself. Here's hoping I continue to accomplish that feat.