Free to be me

Freedom Photo by Aditya Saxena on Unsplash

Independence.

Hmmmm. Thinking about this concept lately, as I see the red, white, and blue coming out around me as folks gear up for Fourth of July picnics and gatherings, the word keeps coming to me.

Independence. Freedom.

It represents so much more for me.

For years, my mantra was – and sometimes still is – Free To Be Me! In fact, that is where the name of my coaching business came from – b.u. Coaching – as I wanted to support others in their own quest to be true to themselves. I want to help others do what I’ve spent much of my adult lifetime learning .. how to be free to love who I am.

Being free to be myself is more than a catchphrase for my coaching business. It holds special meaning for me because, for much of my childhood and formative years, I wasn’t sure who I was, so it was hard to be myself.

Perhaps this is typical of us all. Isn’t one of the things that happens as we grow up that we grow into ourselves?

In those years, we are seeking who we are, but somehow I felt it was different for me because I didn’t feel the freedom to be who I wanted to be. There was some kind of pressure to be a certain way in order to be accepted. I don’t think any one person made me feel this pressure, it came from within me. Somehow, I thought I needed to be whoever anyone else wanted me to be or expected me to be. There was a fear there that if you saw who I really was - - if I even saw that–– you wouldn’t accept me. The thought of that was so painful, I avoided it at all costs.

Sooo..... I started to build my superpower to pretend.

I became a chameleon, morphing myself to show up based on the expectations of the situation I was in or the people I was with. Yet, it was limiting despite there being some “freedom” to become whoever you wanted or expected me to be. I felt the invisible border or boundary that I couldn’t let myself cross. (Ed Note: I write about this in my memoir, Diamonds In The Dirt)

I may have been a good chameleon, but I was in an invisible cage. I wasn’t free to truly be me until I lifted that need to pretend...until I did the work to uncover who I was. Until I was free to yes – you said it – free to be me.

“Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.” Julian Barnes

The power to pretend was a superpower of mine. I was very good at it, and sometimes it was kind of fun. I would anticipate the situation and slowly become what was expected of me so that I could feel like I fit in. Honestly, this process eventually allowed me to find myself and discover who I was among all the roles I was playing.

I don’t think this is very different from my clients and all of us, actually. Don’t we associate our identity with what we “do”? It’s easy to do this, and in fact, isn’t the role we play part of who we are? We too often believe that we are only the roles we play. At first, I found myself by recognizing I was a daughter, sister, friend, girlfriend, employee, wife, owner of a company, mother, etc.

It isn’t an accident that when you first meet someone, perhaps at a party or gathering, in seeking to know the other person, one of the first things we ask in conversation is... “What do you do?”

We are, to some extent, what we do, but my friends, we are so much more than that.

Some of us don’t do the digging into who we truly are until we’ve already played out these roles – until the “third act” of our life, as I recently heard the part of my life I am now living referred to.

This is where the freedom comes in .... where I am beginning to be free to be me.

I think what helps me is that, now that I am in my mid-60s, I’ve reached a point where I no longer want to pretend. I’ve had enough of that, and I just want to be. It is in the being that I can find myself. I can touch what is real inside, sit, and listen. I have the time now to do this.. the freedom to explore.

“Travel far enough, you’ll meet yourself.” David Mitchell

This is not the time to stop exploring my friends. In fact, I think that now is one of the best times to seek out new adventures and try out new things — to “find” who we are. I believe it is when we have lived a full life that we can now turn our attention inside to ourselves.

It’s not that my kids don’t need me anymore – they certainly do. It’s that it is up to me to carve out this time – because I now have it – to do what I want, show up in a way that feels right. This is my time to let the world adjust around me and not the other way around.

I now have the freedom to just be me.

What about you? Can you seek your freedom to be you?

Happy Independence Day!