Your Happiness Is Directly Linked to Living an Authentic Version of Yourself
If you don’t know who you are, how do you expect others to know and love you?
Some of us have remained dormant for years — oblivious to our genuine beauty — drugged senseless by our own numbing disapproval, nagging doubts, and benign neglect. — Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance
Finding my authentic self under layers of life and mismanaged attempts to make myself better had left me exhausted.
All the piling on, covering up, re-doing, and makeovers resulted in the complex problem of not knowing and loving myself.
If I didn’t know who I was how did I expect others to know and love me?
Do you know those hideous creatures from the popular book and movie, The Hunger Games? Their faces and original features covered up, altered, and tweaked into almost unrecognizable, real humans? That’s what some of us have been doing to our souls.
Once I started to revert back and experiment with who I really was and what I loved, I was surprised to find that I looked strange to those who knew (or thought they knew) me.
They would say things like, “I never would have dreamed in a million years that you liked camping.” Or “I hardly recognize you anymore.”
Those comments irked the hell out of me and I wanted to reply, “If you don’t recognize me, perhaps you never really knew me.” But then I realized it was true — they didn’t know the real me — but it wasn’t their fault, it was mine.
Duplicity leads to bondage, authenticity leads to freedom
Duplicity is exhausting because we’re constantly trying to be less or more than who we are. We put on false selves in the presence of others to gain approval, acceptance, love, and opportunity, when all we want is freedom.
Freedom to be who we are and loved for that. Freedom to love others for who they are too. If you’re wondering why friends seem distant and some hold you at arm’s length, maybe it’s because they struggle to know who you are in order to love that person.
In Captivating: Unveiling The Mystery Of A Woman’s Soul, Stasi Eldredge hits the nail on the head for us. For most women, we’ve spent our lives either worrying we aren’t enough or worrying that we are too much.
I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water. — Amy Tan
How can we determine what’s best for ourselves, what meets our needs, and what we want if we’ve not sat long enough in the presence of God to allow him to show us?
How can we be in touch with ourselves if we haven’t learned to listen when our heart speaks?
Simplicity becomes vital to finding this person because a simple approach to life allows the margin we need to sit and become uncovered. Busyness is a chimera — we think we’re busy because we have a full life or because we’re important, or because we’ve arrived. Busyness is often a defense mechanism, put in place so we don’t have to sit long enough for God’s spirit to begin peeling back the layers.
I found that if I sit long enough with God, like a painter’s subject who shows up day after day for hours at a time, he’ll do the work of the Master Artist.
He knows how to restore my amateur attempts at painting my story and he is also able to remove the smudges and grime that have altered my image. His hand is the steady carver who brings back to vibrancy the smoothed over and worn down surfaces I rubbed featureless with worry and tears.
He holds your image in his eye; no marring and scarring caused by the carelessness of others as they attempted to handle you can erase his plan.
If you feel marred, unrecognizable to yourself, or out of alignment with the inner workings of your soul, never lose hope. Cease your attempts to fix it — it’s beyond your ability to repair. Sit. Surrender. The Master wants to restore you to manufacturer settings.
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