Our ideas don't find safety in smallness
For the longest while I lived my life convinced that I could not possibly be the person who was being asked to do this work. Work that pulls me in. That requires me to allow my heart to ache so I can be with you, not see past you.
I would look out at the world and think to myself, But look at that extraordinary human over there. Look at that amazing author over there. Look at that speaker. Look at that teacher. Look at that friend. Look at that family member. Look at that colleague. Surely that person would be a better person than I to say the things I’m feeling. They're going stumble upon exactly what I'm seeing. Just give it time. They're going to speak the exact words I can hear in my heart. No one needs to hear my voice. No one wants to listen to me. I’ve held this belief so tightly, that I realize now in retrospect that I would literally take pieces of what I was discovering, what was bubbling up inside of me, and give them away.
I would tell myself that I couldn't possibly be the one to communicate what needed to be communicated. I couldn't possibly be the vehicle through which this information or insight could ever be given. So I would give it away to people who already had a platform. I would try to pump it through organizations and institutions. I would try to hand it off to leaders, to people that I met who seemed to have standing, in academia, in business, or across various public arenas.
Some of it was unconscious, I think.
Then I would watch and notice extreme discomfort (pain?) as I recognized that bits and pieces of what I was sharing were being leveraged. Taken ever so slightly out of context.
After it happened again, and again, and again, I started to realize that the source of my discomfort lived inside of me.
It took time for me to begin to admit that my running from the feeling of being uncomfortable, my running from the not knowing what would happen if I stood up in the world and shared what was within me, was actually dangerous. My choice to run from me made it so that ideas and concepts and stories that were percolating and bubbling within me would became trapped. Fragmented. Released in part with the story of the whole stuck still inside. Tilting my lived experience. Dissociating from myself, pretending to be less than I am, pretending to not know things that I have been stumbling through for years was making it so that those who were willing to see me when I could not see myself, were able to make withdrawals from my story without my knowing consent. All because I was choosing to live a life where I was disconnected from me.
This discovery hasn't been easy for me to sit with, because I've engaged in the practice of making myself small for a really, really long time. I thought that pretending to be small would keep me safe. I thought that it would make it so that people who didn't like me would leave me be. That my shrinking would allow me to float under the radar. Find ways to appear in conformity with expectations. To bend myself into a false veneer of belonging, so I could feel a bit less alone.
I have been in the process of learning the hard way (over the course of the past 10 years or so), that this is just not true. I can never outrun who I am. I can never outrun what I know, what I see, what I feel in my marrow. I can't outrun me. In order to be present in the world and learn how to show up as myself, as who I truly am, I have to learn how to be uncomfortable. To stay in the discomfort that births growth.
Throughout this time, I’ve been learning how to feel that gnawing sense of uncertainty, of not knowing what to do next, of not knowing which direction to turn. To feel the terror of wondering, Oh my dear God, what will this person think when I say the words I don't know out loud? Oh no. Will they think less of me? Will my standing go down? Will I be viewed as weak? Will they respect me less? What will happen if I admit out loud that I don't know that I don't have all the answers, that I'm not sure where to start, but I am willing to stay inside of this journey? What will happen if I sit down with a friend who's going through agonizing pain and I say quietly, I don't have any words to offer you. I really don't know what to say, but I can sit here with you if you'd like me to. I can be here with you inside of this deeply unwanted experience. And what would happen if I gave that same kindness, that same tenderness, that same gentleness, that same grace to myself?
I think that might be the secret of learning how to be uncomfortable while staying connected. Connected to ourselves. Connected to our stories. Connected to people who are craving less lonliness in the world around us. Being uncomfortable isn’t necessarily meant to be a fork in the road. The more I look at my life, and allow myself to be in my story, the more I think that being uncomfortable - especially when we're in conversations that reach across our differences - is an invitation. It's a flickering light calling us to look closer. At ourselves, our choices, at the context in which we're functioning. To look closer at the connection we so deeply desire, and why we may be avoiding it. To move towards the stories we haven’t lived.
It’s an invitation to show up as ourselves, right where we are, just as we are, in the midst of the not knowing, and become willing to walk in the truth of our story.
No one sees the world exactly like you do. No one can speak the words that are meant to come from you. No one else is living your story.
No one else is living mine.
Being uncomfortable isn't necessarily a sign that we're headed in the wrong direction. It isn’t a signal that we need to shrink. To think smaller. To make ourselves or our ideas less than we are to fit anyone else’s expectations. Being uncomfortable is the match that lights the fire we need we to begin to see, and value, the stories and the choices we hold within more clearly.
These days, I find myself wondering:
What if learning how to listen to ourselves and our stories, while being uncomfortable, might help to set us free?
