For the last year, I have noticed a pattern I did not expect: the more genuine I let myself be with people, the healthier my whole life got. Not just my mood on a given day. My actual relationships, my actual work, the actual people who started showing up in my life instead of the ones I used to let in out of fear of being alone.
For a long time I performed a version of myself that was easier to be liked, and it made me feel hollow in a way I did not have words for at the time. Since I stopped doing that, since I let myself be who I am instead of managing an impression of it, something changed that I still find hard to fully explain.
I get to enjoy things in life that genuinely matter now, not the things I thought I was supposed to want. And the people I have met since then fit what I do and who I really am, instead of fitting the character I used to perform for them.
Part of that meant letting go of people who were not just draining, they were invasive, people who took up space in my life without ever adding anything real to it. I have written about the worst version of that before, what it cost me to finally walk away from a circle that was actively consuming me. But even in the ordinary, less dramatic version of it, every time I have made room by letting someone go who did not deserve the space, more good has shown up almost immediately after. I do not think that is a coincidence anymore. Flourishing and subtracting the wrong people from your life might just be the same motion, not two separate ones.
Before I get into why, I want to say something about whose thinking I am borrowing here. Valentín Fuster was the first person I ever connected with in a way that turned into a real influence, one that has lasted across years instead of fading once I closed the book. I read him for the first time almost five years ago, and his words have only resonated more since then, not less. Watching him talk, on the rare video I can find, makes me genuinely happy. He does not sound like someone performing wisdom for a camera. He sounds like someone who has actually lived enough of life to have earned it.
He has a chapter in his book El Circulo de la Motivacion that I keep coming back to, where he makes an argument I did not expect from a cardiologist: that altruism functions as an actual health behavior, not just a moral virtue you either have or do not. He tracked a real mutual aid group for a year and found their measurable risk factors had dropped by the end of it. He is disarmingly honest about why he thinks it works, he calls himself altruistic out of convenience, because giving and receiving turn out to be far more connected than most people ever stop to notice. People who help consistently, without keeping score, end up receiving more than they gave, in self esteem, in real relationships, in opportunities that only show up once you stop looking exclusively inward.
Fuster frames altruism as one of what he calls his four A’s, positive attitude, acceptance, authenticity, and altruism. Authenticity comes right before altruism in his own framework, not after it. I think that ordering is the whole point. You cannot give anyone something real if you are not being real yourself first.
I think being genuine with people is its own quiet form of that same exchange, even though it does not look like the volunteering Fuster describes. Pretending to be someone easier to like is a kind of withholding. You are giving people a performance instead of a person, and asking them to connect with something that is not there at all. Being genuine, even when it risks someone not liking the real version of you, is the only honest gift you can offer another person.
It costs something to offer it. That is exactly why it counts.
Viktor Frankl argued something adjacent to this his whole career, through what his own framework calls self transcendence: that human beings only find real meaning by reaching beyond themselves, toward another person or a cause worth being responsible to, and that pursuing happiness or self actualization directly, as a goal in itself, almost always backfires. Self transcendence comes first. The wholeness you are chasing arrives as a side effect of it, not the other way around. I think that is what was happening to me without my having a name for it. I was not trying to become more myself by performing a better version of myself. I became more myself by turning outward, honestly, toward people who could meet what was real in me. It is not lost on me either that the same months I have been living this out are the months where more of my actual life, the work, the people, the direction of all of it, has started to click into place than at almost any other point I can remember. I do not think that is unrelated.
So here is what I actually want to say to you, plainly. Focus on being yourself. Do not give that up, and do not apologize for being happy with what you are.
Never give up on who you are trying to become, and go looking for genuine connection instead of a comfortable performance of one. It does not matter if the person you meet is rich or poor, tall or short, impressive on paper or not. None of that decides whether a connection is real. Staying genuine is what decides it. Every time you stay genuine and keep reaching toward people honestly, you end up attracting people who are genuinely good, because the people who only wanted the performance were never going to stay for the real thing anyway.
I am not going to pretend that staying genuine guarantees only good people find you. It happened to me before, meeting people who took advantage of exactly that openness. It has not happened to me since, and I think that is because the more positive energy I put out now, the more of it comes back, and the connections that result are not the surface level kind, not just useful or transactional. They are the kind where I can feel real empathy, where the other person understands what I am without me having to explain it first, where I feel plain and unguarded and whole around them instead of careful.
I understand the fear underneath the hesitation to stay open, because I lived inside it for a long time myself. If you have been hurt before for being genuine, the instinct is to armor up, to decide that guardedness is what protects you going forward. I do not think it does, not really. Guardedness does not filter out bad people, it filters out everyone, good and bad both, before they ever get close enough to matter.
What actually protects you is not a wall. It is paying attention, staying honest with yourself about what you are noticing in someone, and being willing to walk away the moment you see a familiar pattern instead of hoping it turns out different this time. That is a much harder discipline than simply closing yourself off, and it is the only one that has ever really worked for me.
Fuster writes it plainly:
“Ser solidario es una actitud ante la vida.”
Being in solidarity with others is a stance toward life itself, not an occasional gesture.
We spend a lot of energy trying to sell a version of ourselves we think the world wants. None of that energy is required. Happiness, the kind that actually holds up, only shows up once you stop pretending and let yourself be exactly who you are. Altruism as health was never really about volunteering an hour a week. It starts with the much smaller, much harder act of giving people your actual self instead of a performance of it, and trusting that it is enough.
