It took me years to figure out who I was. It took even longer for me to be comfortable showing my real self to the world. Growing up longing to be accepted and loved by my family, I quickly learned that the only way to make that happen was to please everyone and to make sure that everything was harmonious, and to slowly lose myself in the process.
So it was no surprise to discover, years later, that I was still doing the same thing in my adult life. The only difference was that I had traded pleasing the people in my immediate family with pleasing everyone else in my life who came along.
It was all I knew, and the only way I knew to be loved and accepted. I played the part well, and as a result, was always likeable, agreeable, easygoing, and adaptable. These are all very good traits, and can lead to a successful life, but there was a very high price I was paying for behaving like this that I never understood. It’s the price one pays when they become everything someone else wants them to be, instead of being true to the person they are.
It starts early, these patterns of deferring to everyone else instead of listening to our own true selves. It continues on long after we’ve outgrown so many of the other things we outgrow, a part of our programming, mostly unbeknownst to our conscious selves.
It’s no wonder we don’t see what’s wrong.
This kind of behavior is reinforced and rewarded all over our culture. After all, we’re behaving like the good little girls we’ve been brought up to be.
We go so far away from ourselves. And the price that we pay is that we become something other than who we’re meant to be. We become disconnected from our true selves.
Until one day, in a way that’s very different for each of us, that little girl inside us, the one who desperately longs to be heard, finally gets her turn.
We stop. We listen. We’re finally ready to hear her. And we have no choice, because she refuses to be silenced any longer.
And that’s when the real work begins. Oh the beautiful work!
This learning to recognize our true selves. This discovery of who we really are, not because it’s what someone else wants us to be, but because of who we’ve come to realize we really are.
It’s what coming home to ourselves truly means.
It takes a life-changing “A-hah!” moment before we can grasp what that looks like, let alone that it’s where we might want to be. Whether it’s a loss, or a change, or some other monumental moment where we can no longer keep going the same way.
We quickly realize that something has to change, something needs to change, and this time, we’re open and ready to take a look at the one place we’ve never been. Within ourselves.
We can’t blame it on anyone else, we can’t look to anyone else but ourselves, and suddenly, we’re open to seeing things in a whole new way.
It’s not about him, or them, or her. It’s not about what you didn’t get, or couldn’t find, or couldn’t do. It’s not about anything outside of us.
It’s about the only thing it’s ever really been about – you!
But oh how hard that is to see when you’re in the midst of going through the motions of living a life that’s not your own. When you live your life deferring to what everyone else thinks or says about you. When you define yourself by someone else’s standards and don’t realize you can live up to your own. When you let someone else’s narrow vision of who you are dictate who you believe you are.
And just like I learned through my own journey, where I finally came to see that the only person I could ever please was myself, and the only person who was responsible for my happiness was me, I learned just what it meant to come home to myself.
That place we’re always looking for, longing for, even though we seldom realize what it’s called.
That place where we’re loved unconditionally. That place where we belong to someone worth belonging to. It’s always about home; it’s always about that place in our own heart of hearts. It’s always about coming home to be loved and accepted to belong to our own selves.
It’s so much more than a place. It’s what it means to us to be there.
For me, it meant I didn’t have to wonder whether someone would validate me. It meant I didn’t have to wonder if someone approved of me. It meant I didn’t have to look to anyone else to give me worth, to decide if I was okay, to determine what I deserved and what I didn’t.
It meant that I could choose how I wanted to live my life without answering to anyone else but me. It meant I that was no longer a victim of what anyone else chose to do with me or to me. It meant that I had the answers inside myself, if only I was open to hearing them. It meant I was finally free to be myself, to learn the true meaning of what it truly means to be free.
And finally truly come home.
