Authenticity...

First of all, thanks for the sweet Facebook and emailed comments on my Monkey Mind posts.  Your kind words of encouragement mean the world to me!  When I started this blog a couple of years ago, my goal was to find a place where I could be true to myself and speak from the heart about matters important to me.  Read more about that here.  Writing has always been a way for me to organize my thoughts and figure out who I am, but figuring out who I am has been more important to me in the past couple of years as I've been a little lost in figuring out the direction in which my life should go.  I've lost my way a few times, and writing consistently grounds me to a degree.  

It's really hard to figure out who my authentic self is, and to a large degree that is because I am a major people-pleaser and I've spent far more energy and time figuring out how to give other people what they want rather than what my own needs and desires were.  It's really easy to turn my focus to other people when I want to avoid dealing with my own needs.  In its early stages, it felt selfless and generous to always focus on other people, and it was a safe coping mechanism for me when I was younger.  Unfortunately, loss of self and the constant focus on what others need is exhausting and eventually led to resentment - the very opposite of what once felt like a positive way to exist.  

I've heard many times that depression is anger turned inwards.  I never considered myself an angry person, but I've had to acknowledge in the past few months that I have a lot more anger than I ever realized, and it generally manifests in resentment and hurt.  I'd rather do just about anything that get or feel anger, and so I've developed some bad ways of dealing with a very human, necessary emotion.  Now I have to undo it, and it takes time and patience and the willingness to feel discomfort.  

It's still so hard for me to be honest with myself in my writing, both in journaling or here on the blog.  I'm so fearful of criticism or of someone disliking me for something I said.  It's silly and yet so ingrained in my way of speaking, writing and living my life that it warrants addressing in order to move past it.  The only way I can work on it is to take baby steps, and to be a bit more vulnerable than I generally want to be.  

I've been thinking about people I admire or who touch a nerve in me, and I've realized that they are generally people who speak their minds and live their lives in accordance to those beliefs.  And they aren't necessarily people I agree with.  Often the opposite, actually, but I respect people who have conviction and live congruently with their values.  I've realized through reflection and therapy how incongruently I live at times.  I have high standards for myself and others, but often my behavior does not line up with those values, and then I am disappointed in myself and the negativity towards my self spirals out of control.  How many times I have later thought, "I wish I would have said..." or "I wish I would have spoken up...". 

It's so hard to become who we are meant to be.  It takes work to fulfill the potential we have and to give back to the Universe more than we take from it.  How many times I have said, "I should..." or "If only...".  It goes back to active vs. passive behaviors.  A lot of life has passed me by, because when depressed, I don't have the energy or capacity to simply act.  I try to embrace the times when I'm not depressed and make the most of it, but if I'm honest with myself, there's a lot more I could be doing to facilitate the process.  A big part of that is living with authenticity and learning to be who I am meant to be.  What a huge task!  But one that totally started to pay off the minute I started to come out of my shell and figure out who I really am outside of the past roles I have had.  

It's a raw feeling to open myself up to criticism.  I feel akin to a moulting snake.  Using its head upon a hard object, the snake splits its skin and begins the process of crawling out of the old skin turning it inside out.  Mid-process, the snake appears grotesque, but once moulting is completed, the snake's skin is vibrant.  The snake has to go through this process in order to grow, and therefore gets a frequent fresh start, sometimes several times a year.  I'm learning to appreciate that I can have fresh starts as often as necessary, just like the snake.  The snake grows all his life, so he must continually undergo the moulting process.  I'm a big believer in life-long growth and learning, so this is a particularly meaningful analogy for me.  

I hope that as I experience the growing pains of finding my own authenticity, I can remember the inspiration of the snake.  It may not always be pretty, and it may even be quite painful at times, but the potential for vibrancy is always present.