The subject of authenticity has come up for me multiple times this week and I have talked about it before in my other blog posts. I have been in places, not where I’ve struggled to find who I am, but where I’ve been faced with the question of how much of who I am do I let people see and experience?
I am in one of those situations now. I have been in Tasmania for three weeks and I am living at home with my parents. I know! At some point, I am going to have to process the emotions around that. I have made the statement before, with a certain feeling of pride – I was the child who had sprung free from the family home and hadn’t returned. It no longer rings true for me, but it isn’t the time for me to challenge that long held belief about myself. The fact is, I am living at home with my parents until I can find a home for myself. This brings about an interesting conundrum – my spirituality is something that is embedded in who I am and in my own authentic self. My re-connection with writing, my personal coaching/growth business are things that are very important to me. How do I maintain that? How do I stay true to myself while living in an environment that doesn’t hold the same beliefs, values or interests?
It’s interesting that I find myself in the same environment, with the same questions that I had when I was a teenager. How do I be and do me? How do I express myself while living in an environment that makes me feel like the black sheep? My approach to it as a teenager was to hide parts of myself and my experience of the world from my family and friends, to dial my “weirdness” down and follow the flock. That approach made me feel as if I was made up of pieces, that I had separated the parts of myself and couldn’t be a whole person. I was only the parts of me that made other people feel comfortable. I need to have a different approach this time.
I think, those of us who have been through similar “awakenings”, have had times where they begin to see and to feel the difference in themselves and the belief systems in comparison to their family and friends. We begin to question, how we can stay true to the things that make us who we are, our values and our beliefs while in the company of the people we love, value and are important to us? Especially if they have very different beliefs, values and way of living in and of seeing the world?
Some advice that I’ve received is to find my people. If people don’t support my beliefs, values or the integral parts that make up who I am, then they are not my people. I really struggle with this concept though. The people I love are still my people, they just think and believe differently to me. It doesn’t make them any less important to me, it doesn’t make me love them any less. It begs the question – do we need other people to validate who we are, to validate our belief systems, to be interested in the same things as we are interested in? The answer I hear is a big resounding no. In fact, it’s important to have people in your life who challenge your way of thinking, who provide opportunities for you to re-affirm or to challenge your beliefs, who have a different view of the world. We are not sheep, programmed to mindlessly follow the flock to water. We are human beings and souls who are supposed to be different from one another, because if we weren’t different how do we learn and grow and evolve?
When I think about it in regards to my own family – If I acknowledge that I am here to break cycles within my family, it stands to reason that I come with different beliefs, values and interests. That knowledge and acceptance brings about a certain confidence – I can be me, I can meditate, journal, engage in self-growth and spiritual development while living under their roof. I don’t need to shrink or to dial my differences down to make them feel more comfortable. I don’t need them to validate or to approve of who I am and what I believe in. And I don’t need to validate who they are and what they believe in. We are here to learn from each other, to challenge each other, so that we can grow and evolve.
To answer the question I posed in the title of this blog post – is it really that easy to just be you? No, it isn’t. It can be difficult to feel like you’re different from the rest of your family and friendship group. But, you are different from the ones you love and care about for a reason. You are here to challenge, to learn and to grow from one another. Your differences spark different ways of thinking, being and doing in your friends and family. Think about it from this perspective – What if you got up every morning at 5 am to go for a walk around the block? Your family stays in bed thinking, “she’s crazy, who does that? I’d rather sleep” but they begin to see a change in you, maybe you have more energy at the start of the day, you’re happier, you’re starting to see changes in your health and well being and they’re beginning to see it too. This changes their thinking and one day, your Dad decides to get up that little bit earlier and follow in your footsteps. You have challenged their way of thinking, being and doing, and helped them to evaluate what’s working for them and what isn’t and that has led them to change something for themselves in a positive way, simply because you were being you, doing you and taking care of your own health and well being.
You don’t need to do anything other than be yourself to have a positive and lasting impact on someone else!
I come back to the advice I was given – if your people don’t have the same beliefs, values and interests as you, then they’re not your people. I stated that I find that notion difficult to swallow because the people I love have very different ways of seeing and experiencing the world. They have different interests and beliefs, but they are still my people. I do however, want to take the time to acknowledge the importance of finding your people. It is still important to have people around you that you vibe with – people where you are totally free to talk about, to share, to experience the things that light you up. They are your people because they are easy to be you around, they connect you, their presence isn’t challenging, it keeps that…cup inside of you full to the brim.
You need both in life. You need people who challenge you, people who prompt growth and evolution, people you can learn from and you need people who vibe with you. It’s important to have that balance – if you feel like you’re constantly challenged it’s easy to become frustrated, if you feel like you’re always vibing with others and your relationships are always easy and it’s always easy to be you in them, you can begin to feel restless because you’re not growing or evolving.
The take away is, we need to be ourselves, to live authentic lives where we feel as if we are being true to who we are, no matter the people we have around us. Those who challenge us and those who vibe with us are there for a reason. We either prompt growth and evolution in others, they prompt growth and evolution in us, or we fill each other’s cup of connection to the brim. Neither can happen unless we live our lives in ways that are true to our own beliefs, interests and values. Being yourself around those who we feel challenge us, is difficult, because it pushes us or others to look closely at what’s working or not working in our lives, it creates a sense of conflict, it pushes us outside of our comfort zone and as I always tell the students I teach – learning is supposed to be hard, if it’s not hard, you’re not learning. It brings up feelings that make us uncomfortable. But if we can understand why and what purpose it has, it makes it easier for us to sit in that discomfort.
When it comes up for you, or you find yourself in a situation where you’re questioning how much of you to show people, try to switch your thinking from, ‘in being me, I’m making others feel uncomfortable, or I’m feeling uncomfortable,’ to ‘in being me, I am helping other people learn and grow and maybe facilitating positive changes in their lives, or I am growing and learning from them, which brings about positive changes in my life.’
As always, I see you, I hear you and I value you.
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