What’s something you do completely differently from how you were raised?
I think everyone would have a different answer to this question, depending on their own experiences and the way they were raised.
The things we are taught as children, and the way we are brought up, stay with us as we grow. But somewhere along the way, when we begin to understand things a little better, we also start changing something within ourselves.
When we were children, we would wear whatever clothes were given to us. We rarely questioned why we had to wear those particular clothes. But as we grew older and started understanding ourselves, we began choosing what we wanted to wear and how we wanted to present ourselves.
I think life is somewhat similar.
It would be wrong to say that we never change and that we continue living exactly the way we were raised. Some people change their sense of fashion, some change their habits. Some learn to be quieter, while others learn to question.
When I look at my own life, I think I have changed quite a lot.
I had a good upbringing. I am not saying that I was raised badly. But there were certain things and habits I was taught that I followed for many years without questioning them.
I was taught to remain quiet.
I was taught that the decisions about my life would not necessarily be mine to make. The elders would decide what was right for me, and I was expected to accept those decisions without questioning them.
And perhaps the biggest thing I learned was to always be available for others.
Because of this, I kept putting my own dreams somewhere in the background. A part of my childhood passed among responsibilities, and slowly I started believing that being there for other people was simply what I was supposed to do.
But over the past few years, I have started looking at my life more closely.
And I realized something that was not very easy to accept.
Sometimes, I felt as if my value had become like that of a doormat—fine when someone needed me, but barely noticed when they didn’t.
That was when I began to understand that always being available for others is not necessarily a sign of kindness. Sometimes, it can mean putting your own existence aside.
And that is where I began changing myself.
I learned to say no.
I stopped being available for everyone, all the time.
I learned to speak up for my dreams.
And most importantly, I learned to speak up for my self-respect.
For me, this change became necessary because if I had continued doing everything exactly the way I had been taught as a child, I might have slowly moved further away from myself.
I am not saying that everything we are taught during childhood is wrong. There are many beautiful things in our upbringing that we should carry with us throughout our lives.
But is everything necessarily right simply because we were taught it as children?
Perhaps not.
Some things feel right at that age because we are too young to understand them. We simply accept them.
But as we grow older and begin to understand our own lives, perhaps we should also have the freedom to change some of those things.
Especially when a habit starts becoming an obstacle to our dreams.
Or when it begins to affect our self-respect.
Or when it makes us feel that our own desires do not matter.
For me, changing some parts of what I had learned while growing up was not about rejecting my upbringing.
It was about recognizing the things within me that were no longer right for me.
Because if I was going to be considered wrong even while living with those habits, then perhaps there was no reason to keep holding on to them.
That is why I have learned to say no.
I no longer believe that being available for everyone, all the time, is proof that I am a good person.
I no longer think that speaking up for my dreams is selfish.
And I don’t think protecting my self-respect is something I should feel guilty about.
Perhaps growing up is not simply about getting older.
Perhaps it is also about looking back at the way we were raised and asking ourselves:
What do I want to carry with me, and what do I want to leave behind?
Because not everything we were taught as children has to remain unchanged throughout our lives.
Some things add value to our lives, and we should keep them.
But if something is holding us back from our dreams, silencing our voice, or making us feel less worthy, perhaps it is okay to change it.
I think that is what I have been doing.
Not changing who I was raised to be completely, but slowly deciding who I want to become.
And maybe that is the most personal answer I can give to this question.