True Form

It’s so much more than masking, and it’s more than people pleasing.

It’s a lifetime of learning that in order to be liked and accepted, in order to be safe in your environment, you had to get really good at predicting the wants and needs of others.

You had to be a chameleon, blending yourself into the environment around you. A sort of shape shifter. A highly adaptive creature. I reckon it’s why so many of us seem to unconsciously adapt our mannerisms and even our accents depending on who we are spending time with. It’s really not something we do intentionally. We are trained to mirror, to emulate, to copy. Because the original never seems up to scratch to the outside world.

You dedicate yourself to it, until it becomes woven into the fabric of your every day life. Into your relationships, into your sense of self, and self worth. Until the lines become blurred and you realise that most of your encounters with other people leave you feeling really bad about yourself. As if you’ve cheated. As if you’d lied.

You really do lose sight of who you are underneath it all. Your growth is stunted. You find yourself waking up one day and wondering ‘who am I outside of my relationships with other people? Who am I outside of being a wife, a mother, a daughter, a sister. Who am I when I am not attached to someone else?’

As you grow in understanding, as the pieces start to fall into place, you find clarity on life experiences that always eluded you, questions that haunted you, the dusty veil of confusion lifts a little, and you begin to be able to actually see yourself as you really are. It doesn’t happen overnight. Its laborious. It’s a shedding of the layers you have spent your whole life accumulating. You feel tender, and vulnerable, like you’re having to start all over again. But you do, start all over again. You lose some of that stuff you’ve accumulated, and it’s replaced by something even better. You. It fits. It finally fits. Poured into its original shape, its true form.

Your true form.

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash