On Finding Yourself

The opinion other people have of you is their problem, not yours.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

I guess, it is quite amazing how fast I write.  D. just shakes his head when he sees me put an entry together in an hour like I did yesterday. I remind him that my blog is unedited, unrevised and probably full of grammatical errors for people to sit around and joke about lol. (If they were so inclined and if I had readers besides him to critique my work, in the first place :) ..I still don't know if anyone is reading this blog. 

Regardless, I am grateful for the ability and the opportunity I have been blessed with to write.  I honestly do not know where I would be without this medium of expression.  Writing  is my route to self actualization.  It is my route to truth.  It is my route to finding myself.

That is what I want to write about today...finding one's self.  I want to build on what I wrote yesterday.  One doesn't get to  say everything that needs to be said in an hour of writing, do they? So I will continue here.

Finding Self f beyond the Opinion of Others 

 

I first heard the expression, "I am finding myself" when I was child growing up in the 70's.  It seemed that every  peace-loving long haired individual sporting fringes and bell bottomed jeans over platform shoes was in the process of finding themselves. I thought "finding myself" was a fashion trend not a spiritual movement toward enlightenment. 

My parents referred to the notion as drug induced  "hippy nonsense".  Did I mention that  I didn't grow up in the most open minded of environments? lol.  I was taught, in fact, that it was more important to blend in and fit in, to be like everyone else than it was to be yourself...whatever that was.

  I grew up to believe that what others thought of me was absolutely everything.  I was told that I  had to make the world  believe I was darn near perfect if I wanted to be accepted. I was more than a little concerned about people's opinions of me....especially when I realized I could never be perfect.

I was much too sensitive.  I thought too much and asked too many questions people didn't seem to want to answer.  I was too honest and spoke my mind.  I just couldn't go along with things because everyone else was. I preferred the company of animals.  I was different....and many people decided I didn't fit in. 

Belonging was all important; being rejected, forgotten, left out was excruciatingly painful because it meant that I was not "other-like" enough....I was not as "perfect" as they were...I would never fit in...I would be alone with my imperfect self for the rest of my life.

And if others didn't like me...how the hell was I going to spend the rest of my life alone with me?  Why would I ever want to find myself if myself was so hard to like?  

 

 

Things turned out okay. I belonged in many wonderful groups, been in many healthy relationships  and made many true friends over the decades of my life. 

Yet, the pain of not belonging was like a wound that festered inside me waiting to be reopened again and again.  I still believed, even when I was surrounded by people who loved me,  that once I was found out as the imperfect fraud I was...I would be rejected, shunned, kicked out, abandoned, forgotten.  I had to work really had to get people to like me and to keep people liking me. If I couldn't keep up with the pretense...I  also had a tendency to walk away from others before they had a chance to walk away from me...just so I could avoid the pain of discovering that they really didn't like me.

  The pain of needing other opinion pushed me and pulled me through most of my life, until the day I happened upon Maslow's words in a book by Wayne Dyer (  I don't remember which book).  Be independent of the need for the good opinion of others.

I liked how Dyer referred to it because he spoke of other opinion as an emotional need.  It gave hope that maybe we do not have to be dependent on getting people to like us and could still be happy even if the worse case scenario happened and we found ourselves rejected by absolutely everyone.

Maybe, just maybe I could still find peace if my worst fear materialized and I found myself alone. What if I learned to like me...even love me...so if by chance I ever found myself rejected by the whole world ...I would still be okay? I tucked those words in my mind and in my heart and I went off on a search to find myself beyond other opinion.

 

It was quite a journey so far.  I have come an amazing distance and seen my ego deflated again and again...but it still puffs up from time to time and stings like the dickens. 

I have been left and I have left;  I have been pushed out of groups,  sometimes very gently...sometimes not so gently and I have stepped out of groups. 

I have been forgotten by friends and I have forgotten friends. 

I have been liked...genuinely so by some that I felt actually knew me...and I have been disliked by others.

 I have been judged fairly  even if it was with dislike and I have been judged unfairly by others.

 I have people in my life who act like they like me when I know they don't; and others who pay little attention to me but I know they respect me. 

Throughout it all I am searching for and depending on validation for my worth from one person...me.  I want to be the best person I can be for me  regardless of what anyone else thinks.  

 

It is obvious in life...that we cannot please everyone all of the time. 

Not everyone is going to like us or want to be with us.  There will be rejections, criticism,  break ups and negative opinion from others.  That's life.

We are not what people think of us.  We are much more than that.

 If we would only take the time to do what the hippies did and find ourselves...we would come to know who we truly are.  We would also come to see that our own honest opinion  of who we are is the only one that matters. 

 

 

It is all good.

 

All is well in my world.