The Anti-Best Self Club: Invitation, Rules, and Warning
Trying to be your Best Self is ruining your life.
It’s why you’re trapped in eye-rolling friendships that have you questioning your sanity after a judgy-gossip-infused Sunday Funday brunch. It’s why you dread waking up every morning to respond to 37 “circling back around” emails. It’s why you have a Terrible-Twos level meltdown when you contemplate swiping through one more “A green flag I look for is cuddling” dating profile. It’s why you have that itchy skin sensation when you look at your calendar and just see a black hole of nothingness is not a sign of self-loathing.
Despite what you might think, you don’t…
Hate your life because you’re an abject failure or because you forgot to say please and thank you that one Monday in May when you were 13.
Feel like a zombie trudging through the last dregs of the apocalypse because you’re lazy, a fundamental screw up, or broken beyond repair.
You softly (maybe deeply strongly) detest your life because you’re bored.
And you’re bored because you’ve been trying to lead a deep fulfilling life by chasing your Best Self. The Best Self is… well, uninteresting.
“Boring. v — to make (someone) tired and annoyed by being uninteresting or too much the same.” — Britannica
You keep muttering like a broken record, “I just want to feel like myself again” because you’re not taking action to make your life… well, your favorite life.
TO BE A MEMBER OF THE ANTI-BEST SELF CLUB YOU MUST MEET THE FOLLOWING QUALIFICATIONS.
You must be a burnt-out over-achiever obsessed with self-improvement metrics and any and all life hacks, collecting certifications and courses like they're .
You must be a perfectionist who crashes out at any deviation from The Plan™️ and avoids rejection at all cost.
You must have a LOUD inner critic whose prized possession is a FOMO clipboard and declares “TOLD YOU SO” at failures and “STILL NOT ENOUGH” at achievements.
You must be a peer-reviewed people-pleaser who secretly wishes they were still in bed… at home… like always.
You must be a chronic shape-shifter who’s lived approx. nine different lives and has at least seven different versions of themselves, yet somehow still feels lost even in crowded of rooms.
You must be drowning in ennui about your daily routine while simultaneously spiraling weekly about whether everything is meaningless—all while scrolling for that next hit of dopamine.
You must be a chronic over-learner yet never doer, someone who can explain in excruciating detail why you are the way you are but still can't figure out how to transform knowledge into meaningful IRL fulfillment.
If you checked off four or more, you've been cordially accepted.
Welcome to the radical rebellion against boring "best self" tyranny.
Rule #1. Your Best Self requires you to abandon the most interesting parts of yourself.
The Best Self means that there is a Worst Self. Since there isn’t a Worst Self, the Best Self is a deplorable trap.
Inherently, the Best Self is exclusionary of all the grotesque, scrumptious, Rock and Roll, pleasure-inducing, goose-bump-creating parts of your psyche—the parts that make you so uniquely human. They’re also the parts that make you profoundly and magnetically interesting.
All anyone on this floating space rock wants is to be fully and completely themselves.
Trying to be your Best Self makes that impossible. The pursuit of the Best Self bores holes in an already porous psyche.
“Boring. v — the process of enlarging a hole that has already been drilled (or cast) by means of a single-point cutting tool” —Er. Ankush Aggarwal ( B.E , M.E)
Porous because you haven’t spent time examining and extrapolating uninfluenced self-acceptance. Weak because little of what you call your story was narrated consciously.
“We are the sum total of our experiences.” — B.J. Neblett
Yet, you forget that you are a living and breathing experience. In the pursuit of likable, lovable, acceptable, esteemable, you forget to write your own narrative about your own lived experiences.
True self-liberation happens when the grey-between becomes a living technicolor daydream—when you accept that which you’ve rejected, find the light in the dark, and reclaim the parts you’ve been ordered to abandon.
Your inner smutty fanfic writer. The spell-caster and curse-breaker. The 1:43am dance floor twerk-master. The 16th century melancholic poet. The reclusive mountain-side hermit. The overly bubbly, gossip master. The constantly enraged Middle Earth dwarf. The pious and devout choir singer.
Inspired reclamation is the only path that eliminates self-destruction.
Put plainly, your Best Self is boring because your Best Self is not your Whole Self… …which is why you’re still waiting in patient agitation for the you feel like yourself again.
Rule #2. Your Best Self is an unoriginal copy-cat that will always keep you excluded and rejected.
You can’t be your Best Self and be authentic. To be your Best Self is to have your actions, personality, behavior, and choices tainted by the expectations of others.
The Best Self is defined and designed by others—the media, teachers, coaches, guides, healers, authors, actors, singers, religious leader, and peers. You want to be accepted, which is why you crafted your Best Self.
However, the Best Self will never truly be accepted because humans revere ingenuity, originality, and raw self-expression—it is the most desired quality because it defines conformity.
At the end of the day, each and every human on this scorched green earth wants to be accepted when they are radically and unabashedly themselves. Everyone wants to break out of the chains that have bound them. Everyone wants find their own truth and thrive a world that harmonizes by their secret hope and most intrinsic rules.
The Best Self? It’s designed to follow western capitalistic society’s rules and regulations. It’s a mask. It’s bland. It’s… just simply unoriginal. The Best Self will only ever bring monotony and boredom — exclusion disguised as false acceptance.
Conformity is only a step away from inauthenticity. Inauthenticity is repellant.
No wonder you’re bored. Nothing about the Best Self is courageous or sacredly yours.
The Best Self fakes bravado slightly in a too shrill voice instead of oozing rasping magnetism as you let your freak flag fly to thundering applause.
The Best Self is a facade that promises riches at Midas’s touch, declaring that one’s success always signals another’s tragedy.
Subscribing to others expectations instead of creating your own is always going to be ruthlessly boring—especially for the deeply intuitive old souls that are young at heart.
These are the type of people who want nothing more to let their freak flag. Who drown within unexpressed potential. Who are designed to be free and light, playing hopscotch through the various highs and lows of life.
By nature, the old souls and the young at heart require unique problems, unique solutions, unique rewards, and unique methods of self-expression.
If you’ve never redefined perfection with intuitive direction and you’ve never examined what would truly please your soul, you’ll always remain trapped in the Best Self asylum, praying for an escape route that’ll never appear, no matter how old you grow.
Rule #3. The antidote to shriveling as your Best Self is seeking and becoming your Favorite Self.
If you want true acceptance, pursue your Favorite Self.
The Best Self will always keep you trapped in a loop repeating the same patterns over and over and over again without getting a different result.
Becoming and living as your Favorite Self make life profoundly fascinating, a never-ending-magestic adventure where the lore is profound and the potential limitless. Unfurling your Favorite Self will make you feel like you’re living a daydream because you’re Favorite Self is the most authentic, aligned version of you.
Your Favorite Self is the version of you that is untamedly magnetic, attracting untold riches, timeless lovers, and ride-or-die friendships.
Your Favorite Self falls in love on cobbled street corners and finds whimsy in regular-degular store window displays.
Your Favorite Self is the person you are when you're living according to your deepest values—generous, kind, loyal, equanimous, hopeful, honest, and free. They listen and trust their intuition—the inner knowing that promises you can trust the unknown and obey your soul to show up in the world without restriction or apology.
Your Favorite Self can never be boring because it is in a constant state of evolution—with each new spark of awe that strikes, you grow and incorporate. It is deeply creative, ever unfolding, accepting all parts of you—younger, shadow, higher, future, and inner.
Being your Favorite Self is about rejecting societal expectations and living by your own definition of perfect. Your Favorite Self allows you to accept yourself AND others—the secure and expansive relationship that are fulfilling and lasting are ones where everyone wins.
… And so The Anti-Best Self Club is the world’s most inclusive club!
By it’s members, it’s affectionately called The Favorite Self Club.
When you live your life as your Favorite Self, not only will you magnetize everything you crave to you, you will be unapologetically celebrated by other people who want you to be more you. There’s no competition, only inspiration. There’s no envy, only respect. There’s no judgement, only respect. There’s no rejection, only inclusion.
The more you you are, the more unapologetically accepted you will be.
The Anti-Best Self Club EVEN accepts boredom because it is the invitation to become even more of your Favorite Self, again. In the pursuit of inspiration and the favorite, everything becomes infinitely more interesting.
Every moment is an invitation to fall more in love with yourself. Every roadblock becomes an amusement park ride. Concrete jungles turn into pillows forts. Your blocks turn into portals. Everything becomes more and more alive.
The journey to living your life as your Favorite Self never ends so neither does this membership!
Every version of you that has, does, and will ever exist is a facet of the same whole, alway welcome in this exclusively inclusive membership club.
Warning.
Living as your Favorite Self comes with side effects.
You'll find others' answers unsatisfying and become bored by monotony.
You'll navigate uncharted territory with your own map—challenging but exhilarating.
You’ll have to carve out intentional time to your creativity and court your soul.
You’ll have every single tool you could possibly need, but have to use to discernment with how to use them.
Your admirers will multiply exponentially and you will have to carefully curate your companions.
You'll tire of being idolized, recognizing your sycophants have missed the point: they should be becoming their Favorite Self, not envying yours.
Each day is an invitation you must accept to fall even deeper in love with your one true glorious self.
