CONGRATULATIONS, YOU PLAYED YOURSELF

You played yourself !

 The act of playing yourself—as in “Congratulations, you played yourself,” a catchphrase adopted few year’s by DJ Khaled—can be loosely defined as working against your conscious intentions.

To play yourself is to do things either consistently wrong but with good intentions, incorrectly without noticing, or (especially) trying to set someone else up for failure, and then end up becoming the object of your actions. In other words, you acted in such a way that the resulting failure is your fault, and yours alone. Do you know the phrase ‘'he is his own worst enemy?’ we have the ability to betray our own best interests. When you ‘'play’ a fish on the line, you are working to set the hook and reel the fish in for the catch ) kill. Just so, instead of successfully playing someone else ( think “The Sting”), we can some how play ourselves ( as the sucker ) It’s what you do when you think you’re serving your own interests but are actually betraying them—often through significant effort, often in a spectacularly public way. 

Don’t play yourself 

One of the toughest parts of playing yourself, though, is that the player’s understanding of their misstep isn’t necessarily part of the equation. Consider the chain of events: Up until the moment you play yourself, you think you’re pursuing a valuable goal backed by sound reasoning. When you don’t meet your goal, your first instinct may not be to ask, “Have I….. owned myself?” And unless someone takes you aside to help you understand what the deal is, you may very well miss the play altogether. So essentially, playing yourself is making a big show out of demonstrating something, and then either bungling your point or contradicting yourself entirely during the demonstration. And we have played ourselves a lot this year. It’s still September but yah we did what we did.

Someone once said “Accepting that playing yourself happens, that’s the ideal way to go,” and I agree, but I’d also like to challenge us all to go a step further in 2023. There’s a quote I saw in a movie recently that goes, “It is the nature of every person to error, but only the fool perseveres in error.” In other words, it’s normal to fuck up. That doesn’t make you an idiot. What makes you an idiot is noticing you’re probably fucking up and choosing not to do 

anything about it.

One step ahead

This is nothing to be ashamed of afterall, ain’t we all fucking up somehow? So in this next calendar year, when the suspicion you’re in the middle of a self-own pops up, maybe turn to someone and say, “Hey, am I playing myself right now?” And maybe they’ll let you know. Maybe they’ll even talk to you about it and share some of their perspective, and you’ll be able to proceed with more than just your own thoughts and feelings to work from. Will it stop us from making mistakes? Of course not cause we barely even listen to what other’s say but It might even open the doors to make fresh new ones! But it also might help us understand our shit enough to not repeat our gaffes over and over again in new and exotic contexts.

DON’T PLAY YOURSELF: Earlier today as I lay in bed I thought “I should really get my a** up and type something for my blog letting all my followers/ viewers in the blogosphere know that I aspire to make weekly posts. The ideas weren’t the problem, the posting was. Always too occupied or tired to document my maze of thoughts. And I knew that I was starting to play myself maybe having 2/3 modes was the problem. Eventually I managed to muster up the energy to get out of bed and started typing and I almost played myself but I had to be like “Are we really doing this now? Am I playing myself ?”

These may be things you already know ( I’m kind of making this post to give a 2023 pep talk to myself as well lol), but sometimes we need reminders. You were made for the life you want, you aren’t helping anything or even doing yourself  a favor by hindering yourself or your talents or trying to fool yourself for the sake of other’s. This life is the only one you’re going to live, so it’s an absolute MUST that you live it the fullest.

Aim high at all cost

Playing small most likely, will not get you far. If you play small, your life overall will… be.. small? You get what I’m saying!!! Why not want to go after the best, do the best in everything you want and do? Why hinder yourself to only what you feel comfortable with? I’m sure you’ve seen the quote everywhere that nothing comes from being in your comfort zone, right? Well, it’s true. Here’s a motivational push: I wanted to say this year but oops it’s already too late for that but next year do something that makes you uncomfortable at least once and watch how scary yet good it’ll make you feel. Say it with me, no  more playing small. Play big, and get big results. Because the last thing that we want is to play ourselves and trust me…

don’t play yourself.