HOW TO BECOME YOUR REAL SELF
Author Melissa Camara Wilkins says it’s time we accepted ourselves
Life is complicated. I always wanted to feel like I had it all together, like I was qualified to be a person. But no. Most of the time, I was pretty sure I was doing it wrong. In fact, I had a charming personal mantra: I am the worst. It was like an affirmation, except the opposite. Everyone else seemed so confident about existing. ‘Yes,’ they seemed to say, ‘I do take up space on this planet and that’s cool.’ I, on the other hand, was running late, wearing the wrong shoes, and anxious about whether the twinge in my side meant I was dying of an undiscovered illness or if I’d just strained a muscle by sneezing while reaching for my sunglasses. I was judging myself so other people wouldn’t have to. I was deciding I came up short before anyone else ever needed to measure. I thought that was my job, because I could see the truth about myself, the truth that looked, to me, like a giant list of things to work on. I’d tried fixing myself, but fixing things hadn’t made me better. Fixing things made me tired. Because the truth is that you can’t fix everything. Some things just are the way they are.
No matter how many bowls I bought to hold my keys, I never remembered to actually put them there. (I did keep trying though, because the next one I bought might be magic.) No matter how many times I told myself that my kids had colds and not swine flu, I continued to secretly worry that the world was about to end. No matter how friendly someone might seem, I always suspected that
they only let me stay at the party because I brought the sliced fruit.
Being the worst is exhausting. That’s what I was thinking about when I went to hear my friend Jessica speak at her church. Jessica and I weren’t exactly friends yet, but we’d met a couple of times. I knew her background was in social work. I knew she was going to be talking about brokenness and shame and God and connection. I saw the email invitation and thought, ‘I’m in.’ If you’re working on becoming more whole, that means you’re walking around aware of your brokenness all the time. You see all the gaps and untidy corners, all the dark places and sticky patches that still need to be worked through. It’s complicated. If you’re going to make things better, you have to be aware of what needs fixing. And I was very, very aware.
‘Embracing your worth doesn’t require perfection,’ Jessica said, as though she believed you could be kind of a mess and still be okay. As if that feeling of brokenness might be like a burned-out light bulb: it needs attention, but it doesn’t mean the whole house needs to be torn down. I glanced at the woman to my right, whom I did not know. What would I say to her if she turned and told me she was doing everything she could, her absolute best, but she still couldn’t get it together? What would I say? I would tell her the truest thing I know, which is that, at her core, her deepest identity is love. The building blocks of her soul are love. It’s what she’s made of and what she was made to be. That, I later came to realise, is true of everyone.
‘Judgment has to go,’ Jessica said. ‘We have to stop judging ourselves and each other. People are the way they are for a damn good reason.’
Did she not know that I could never find my other shoe? That I forgot to reply to text messages? That I was constantly disappointing people and getting things wrong and falling short? She kept talking, but a tiny glimmer of an idea started stretching itself out in the back of my mind. What if this was just what it meant to be human? What if being a person meant being kind of a mess, even if you tried really hard? What if I wasn’t the only one? Everyone else here was human, too, as far as I could tell.
That was the day I learned that I didn’t have to listen to the voices that told me I had to earn my right to exist, the ones that said I wasn’t quite good enough, but maybe, if I kept trying, someday I’d get there. That I didn’t have to keep an ongoing and always-up-to-date list of all my flaws. No, this was what it meant to be human.
I’d thought my job was to practise seeing every true thing about myself, but that’s not what I had been doing at all. I hadn’t been seeing a self, I’d been seeing all my dented pieces and keeping an inventory for insurance purposes. But what if life is just complicated, and me trying to fix it had been making things more complicated all along?
Maybe we are not meant to become better. Maybe we’re meant to become truer. What if that’s the goal? Not to become something you’re not, but to accept the truth of who you are – the truth that you are a messy, confused, flailing expression of love in the world? Maybe the simplest, truest version of ourselves is that one. Maybe the real work of our lives is to strip away the extra stuff we’ve added on top, so we can know who we really are; to stop seeing our true selves as problems to be fixed. Maybe love – the love that animates us, the love that is as close as our breath, the love that is in us and through us – is offering us invitations to peel back those layers, to see ourselves more clearly, everywhere and all the time.
Trying to fix yourself does not make life less complicated. I know this for sure. I’ve tried it, and it only makes life more difficult. The only thing that works is being who you are behind the shell, who you were made to be. It’s what remains when you take off the armour.
What you are letting out when you crack open your shell is not just your own darkness. What you are letting out is your truth, and that truth is healing. Truth is nuanced and complicated, but telling the truth is simple. You just say what you see and say who you are. Your truth may be made up of oozing fear and anxiety and worry and mistakes and failure, but it is also made of laughter and connection and beauty and wisdom and creativity. Truth is light and dark, truth is the falling and the healing, truth is the good stuff and the bad stuff. It’s everything that belongs – and everything does belong – all mixed up together.
That’s where the healing is. It’s not in waiting for someone else to give you permission to be human. It’s not in hiding the truth when you feel miserable. It’s in giving yourself permission to be everything you are, with nothing to hide.
Brené Brown says that the wilderness is where true connection is born. ‘When we are willing to risk venturing into the wilderness, and even becoming our own wilderness, we feel the deepest connection to our true self and to what matters most,’ she writes. It seemed to me that if I was going to figure out which direction to walk in, I was going to have to find that connection first.
And so, I gave myself permission. Permission to take note of what filled me up and what drained me. I gave myself permission to notice what gave me life and what felt like a chore. Your true voice is not the tapes that run in your head. It is the voice that rises up within you when you quiet all the other noises. It does not tell you to take what you want, or to feed your comfort and idolise your own security. It does not tell you to look the other way and ignore everyone else’s needs – and it does not tell you to ignore your own, either. It does not tell you to run from the pain that comes along with being human. Your inner voice comes from the self that you are in love and in truth. Cherish it. Trust it. Because making yourself available to the questions makes you available to the answers, too.
‘I WAS JUDGING MYSELF SO OTHERS WOULDN’T HAVE TO’