This is the bedrock quote for the book Daring Greatly by shame and vulnerability researcher Brene Brown. I return to it every now and then when I need a reminder about being okay with being messy.
Lately, life has been messy. Without going into details or having a pity party for one, I am going to acknowledge that what I am experiencing in spades right now is not a solitary experience. There are other people who have been here, are here, and will be here. It’s through this space of connection that I feel safe to feel the feels. And I return to this quote because it not only applies to the actual critics in my life, of which there are a few, but it also applies to the inner critic, that is so often weighing actions and reactions to things that are many times beyond my control.
The best I can do is show up and try.
If you are brave with your life, and you choose to live in the arena, you are going to get your ass kicked. You are going to fall, you are going to fail, you are going to know heartbreak. It’s a choice…
Many of us know how hard it is to show up and try for important or significant moments in our lives, but what about showing up and trying for the mundane ones? The moment to moment, moments? How hard it is to be present with ourselves, when we feel things like disappointment or failure or imperfection… how equally hard it can be to be present with the wins like success, joy, or accomplishing a small but necessary task.
Lucky me, I have had the opportunity to experience both over the course of 48 hours.
This past Thursday, a huge work-related project launched. This is something I have worked hard for and dedicated myself to for the past 8+months. The culmination of this work was celebrated in the form of a three-hour event where I participated in well wishes and small talk, and yet I undermined my enthusiasm for the show because I didn’t want to seem arrogant or overly confident, when in truth this is the best work, I have done. I want to celebrate the win of hard work, but personal criticism keeps me in a kind of limbo of cool pragmatism. Why is it so hard to lean into the win? to show up for ourselves and our hard work? when we know we are doing our best given the circumstances and that our best is literally the best we can do which is something not to dismiss but to feel good about? Why are we programmed to undermine the accomplishment to quickly rush off to the next? What would it look like to slow down and be present with the feeling of goodness with a job well done and then aknowleging the need for rest and recovery after such steadfast devotion?
I also recently left/lost my phone on the heels of a moment where I was getting myself tangled in a swirl of things. Swirls often are an emotional cocktail of second guessing and internal pressure changes related past coping mechanisms trying to hotwire my body/brain to reconnect to old ways of operating, often spurred sometimes by hunger, changes in medications, tiredness, and/or the vulnerability of showing up and not having a plan. It is a lifelong dedication to notice when and how these swirls come about, but even more so to sit with them and allow the shit-storm to sort itself out (because they always do whether or not I get involved or emotionally invested.) They are really nothing more than a manifestation of anxiety in the form of overthinking.
The truth is, that the more I work at showing up as myself for myself, the more the old, imbedded ways will try to rise to the surface. I need them to rise to the surface, so that I can skim them off and allow for the new neuropathways to make contact. It’s not easy, its uncomfortable and while losing my phone had nothing to do with anything, it became a catalyst as a much-needed reminder that I don’t have to have control over everything in my life, especially when I strive so often to seem like I do.
I choose courage over comfort.
So here I am at 1am in the morning having a late night musing about rewatching an outdated ted-talk followed by a Netflix special on courage all because I lost a 5.4” x 2.6” x 0.2” device that I believe tethers me to reality/sanity/togetherness, when really it’s a false sense of security… AND… because I have yet to really allow the sense of accomplishment from a year of hard work, putting myself out there, and showing up for myself professionally to sink in.
…vulnerability is having the courage to show up when you can’t control the outcome…
Oh, and I neglected to mention that I asked for help in retrieving the phone… something so benign, but also something that didn’t’ feel comfortable, not because of the ask, but because of what the ask said about me in my mind: that if I can’t keep track of my phone, how can I possibly keep track of my life… silly really, now that I see it written out. People lose things all the time, they lose keys, they lose socks, they loose change, they lose passwords, and they lose phones… they also forget to water their plants. No big deal.
Failure helps us become more resilient versions of ourselves. Imperfection is what makes us human and more relatable, and in turn brings us closer to those also willing to fail upward alongside us.