Tell us about a time when you felt out of place.
I arrived for my first day of the first-grade. Ms. Key was my teacher. I did not know her; I did not know anyone in my class. I did not like riding the bus. I did not like much that day. Thus, I began my formal education. Also, I began a lifelong, self-protective pattern of dealing with anything new and different in my life.
What did that pattern look like? Over time, I came to translate that fear of the new into a false bravado. Looking back now, I see clearly how that pattern developed and became the “safe” way for me to enter new spaces. I became the pattern for many new experiences, pretending to be bigger-than-life, at least bigger than I perceived my own life.
Now in my later adult life, I have decided to show up to new experiences as myself, not as some bigger-than-me character I invent for the day. As a person who values authenticity, creating a big, “obvious” false person meant maintaining that persona. It also proved much more difficult to be real at some later point and to find people who would believe this new presentation was real. Start out “false” and the consequence is being perceived as false, arrogant, or both. Showing up as myself did not happen all at once.
Waking up takes work… Therapy, meditation, spiritual practice, and wisdom mentoring are no easy path.
Waking up takes work. Attending to the unconscious patterns we learned for self-protection in childhood takes energy, focus, help, and releasing the pattern, often over and over. Therapy, meditation, spiritual practice, and wisdom mentoring are no easy path. Still engaging the process has been worth the effort for me. I am aware of my gifts and can claim them (some of the time); I can live the life I have been given more fully. My Presence means something and is real.
Perhaps feeling out of place is common to all human beings. Perhaps that is why we develop so many differing (healthy and unhealthy) coping mechanisms. Each of us wants to survive; we do whatever we perceive as necessary to succeed at surviving. We can be healed of these mechanisms and made whole. Wholemaking is our shared work, one we do together and in solitude; it is a work of real seeing and truth-telling. Make no mistake, though; getting to being yourself is an endeavor.
Feeling out of place? What might be your next step toward being whole?
Infinitely Precious 