If I were to add anything to this chapter, it would be this: FIND SOMEONE. Find someone who will listen to you, love you, cheer you on. Find someone who will guide you, believe in you, remind you of who you are. Find someone who will sit with your crazy, sit with your creativity, sit with your questions. Find someone who is not afraid of your strength, your beauty, your power.
If you have to pay that person, so be it. Maybe even all the better. That way they have no investment in your image, nothing to lose. Oh, and, they’re forced to sit and listen to you.
If you have to assemble a group, well then. Maybe some other people are looking for someone with whom they can share their real lives, too. You could get together and cook or write or walk . . . and you could let the truth spill out of the seams.
If that person is already in your life, then make a point to see them . . . soon. Often. Place a call. Send a text.
Find someone you can share your real life with. In other words, find someone who can not only tolerate your humanity, but can celebrate it, love you in it, accept it. Find someone who isn’t interested in the slickest version of you but is, instead, interested in the most human version of you. The real you.
Find someone who can handle your secrets, handle your shame, handle your insecurities. Find someone who can love you better than you can love yourself . . . and let them teach you how to be more empathetic toward yourself, more unconditionally loving, more understanding, more comforting.
Find someone who is safe enough that you can risk letting him or her in.
Today, I talked to someone who I love. She told me about buddy breathing in scuba diving, how someone comes up next to you and shares their tank if there’s something wrong with yours. Man, I love that. I wish that story was in this chapter. A breathing buddy. How perfect is that? Don’t we all need a breathing buddy pretty much always?
As we learn to trust the breathing buddies in our lives, we become people who are able to show others our humanity, which gives them something to attach to. When we only show people our slickness, they tend to just slide right off. But if we can tolerate exposing who we really are, all our textures, then we give people something to connect to. This is the work of becoming more comfortable in our own skin, and it’s a game changer, I believe.
My next book, Brazen (which will be out in the Spring) talks all about hiding, and also the great alchemy of emerging. I think “Sharing Real Life” is one important step in our refusal to hide. Some of us are still believing that hiding has its perks, its payoffs, and that’s probably because we have yet to experience what it’s like to share who we really are and be loved, right there in the middle of our magic and our mess.
So, I guess that brings me back to: Find. Someone. Make it your personal mission to find someone who has so confronted their own mess and their own magic that they are ready and able to wrap their arms around yours.
Amen.
What did you take away from this chapter?
