There is a message filtering through a lot at the moment – BE YOURSELF.
Be yourself; stay true to yourself, and just do small things to help that flow out and life will be better. Be yourself and you'll be able to keep going strong through road blocks, relationships, triumph or challenge. Be yourself, and you will make it.
I heard it on Iggy Pop's Peel lecture, read it in Dave Tomlinson's book about how not to do religion, mused on it while watching Grayson Perry's series 'Who Are You' about identity, and I'm hearing it in conversation with friends, and I start to feel overwhelmed with this exhortation because why is it that it needs pointing out?
It's hard, isn't it. With the freedom created by technology the emphasis on individuality and unique personality seems to be more sharp than ever. The world seems noisier and noisier, but to keep being you, you need quiet and space. It's important to find time to think, and be still, and see what bubbles up to the surface.
I've been travelling around on trains this week, and with a new notebook, found myself drawing a simple picture on the left page, and writing about thoughts it represented on the right. Anything that came to mind really. It's been interesting to see what emerged about life past and present. Keeping it to a single page at a time is very manageable. No tomes here, but enough to get me appreciating what's true and constant.
It's alright for us artists and makers, who pick up sticks and carve shapes in the sand (or a glorified version of) every day. Our business is birth to expression, exploring ways of seeing and being, and so sometimes without realising it, we become very good at being ourselves. We know overtly what external things resonate or what jar with that inner life. My true admiration is for people who don't need to do all that soul searching and still stand tall with a strong sense of their own identity, unafraid to walk it out.
Everyone wants to belong, and everyone can find a sense of belonging in echoing the looks and behaviours and sounds of each other. But being truly ourselves is about bringing out the parts of you that are not like anyone else, and in confidence that no one else gets to decide which parts are allowed and which parts are not. The variety makes life richer, and much more interesting, even if it seems messy at times. (And it will seem messy.)
Be yourself; stay true to yourself, and just do small things to help that flow out. Go with positive motivation, like a little butterfly flapping its wings, oblivious to the possible amplified effects elsewhere, simply driven by the need to live and move honestly here and now and make connections good and real in the world*.
"Be yourself; everyone else is taken," the saying goes.
{Today's Soundtrack: New Build – Sunlight - Edit}
* Thanks Dave Tomlinson for your butterfly-style encouragements, which helped prompt my thoughts.
2 comments:
Thank you for the thoughts, Lizzie. I've done a lot of thinking about what 'me' is, too, in the past year or so. I do find that to be creative I need quiet, reflective time. But I also found that's only one part of me and I get down in the dumps if I spend too much time introspecting. I'm quite a different person when hanging out with people - and different again with different people or big or small groups, or different with my partner or without. Aren't we all? I've decided there are many 'mes' and all are real and true. There is no 'essence of me' to discover.
I work in an organisation that is obsessed with 360 degree feedback and in 15 years I've become used to people telling me what I'm like. For a while I let this begin to define me, and I tried to change myself to fit what the organisation wants. The organisation, annoyingly, also tells you that at senior levels you must 'be yourself' and be 'authentic'. It's all very infuriating! What this has taught me is that everyone has their own vantage point, but all of them are subjective views, and often given in a specific context. They can't tell you who you are but they can tell you how you seem and whether that's a good or bad thing if you want to achieve certain things in my job.
In recent years I've been told that I can appear diffident and that I should speak more in large meetings. Yesterday I made a point of being authoritative and "taking up air-time" in what I thought was a useful way. In true diplomatic style, I was given a signal by the Chair that I had taken too much time saying things that weren't action-oriented, and they all needed to hurry off to some other meeting so could I please shut up? What did I draw from this? Mainly that you can't win with most people. They will perceive you in relation to them, not "as you" so you might as well be yourself and accept that not everyone will like it. It's taken me a while to get to this point!
We exist in the world and so we are defined by it. Yet we all react in subtly different ways to many, many things, and that unique combination of experiences is what makes us interesting and ourselves. That's what I think today, anyway… of course, I might change my mind!
Thanks for your thoughtfulness Caron, and yes, we do all have many different parts, and they are not always welcomed by, eg. the chair of a meeting whose job it is to keep to an agenda!
But I think you hit the nail on the head – "we all react in subtly different ways to many, many things, and that unique combination of experiences is what makes us interesting and ourselves."
So pursue whatever keeps the flow going, and if we can master the art of doing that in combination with other humans then all the better!
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