Currently viewing the tag: "connection"
The other day I was telling a deep-thinking friend about how I just needed to be more comfortable being myself. This is the advice we always hear, isn’t it? In dating, in job interviews, anywhere where we feel someone will judge us. We hear ‘just be yourself and everything will turn out okay.’
After I spoke, my friend, in his deep-thinking way, was silent for a moment, then said “I don’t actually agree with that.”
“What?” Isn’t that what we’re always told we’re supposed to be? Ourselves?
“There are ways that we can be ourselves that don’t serve us,” my friend explained. “Your insecurity doesn’t actually serve you, but that’s part of your self.”
Well, he had a point. After some thought, I realized that the way to be, rather than just ‘ourselves’ is to be our best selves. On dates, we don’t want to be our insecure selves, our angry selves, or our petty selves, though those are all parts of most of us. We want to be our best selves: balanced, open, discerning. In job interviews, we don’t want to be our desperate, insecure, or greedy selves, though those are all parts of most of us, too. We want to be our best selves: intelligent, poised, competent. When people suggest ‘just be yourself’, they aren’t suggesting that we give rein to those parts of our selves that operate as the child in each of us, grasping, acting out, stubborn, and reactive. Though those parts are ourselves just as much as our open, honest, kind, and light-filled selves.
In short, we need to be discerning in the selves that we choose to be. And we need to work with the parts of ourselves that don’t serve us, to find out what they’re trying to tell us so that those parts can dissipate and lose the power they have to derail us, to send us into yet another tailspin.
When I’m my best self, I can still sense the parts of me that are insecure, afraid, controlling, or angry, but those parts aren’t in ascendance. They have very little control over my actions, though they may continue to whisper in my ear. Like a parent with a child who is in need, I can hear their messages and choose not to escalate their emotions, while providing, to the best of my ability, what they need to feel safer.
One of my goals in life is to surround myself with the situations and people that support my best self rather than the ones that inflame the parts of me that don’t serve me. I don’t just want to be myself. I want be a particular sort of self: my BEST self.
What about you? What is your best self, and what are the situations and people that bring it forth? And can you have more of those in your life?
By Melissa Kirk
Loneliness and I have a strange and long-standing relationship. No matter how socially active I am, no matter how fast I’m running around filling my hours with friends, projects, chores, and daily tasks, loneliness is always there behind me, like a little kid holding onto my shirttails. It likes to come to the forefront on grey weekend days when I have no real plans, or when something has happened to disconnect me from friends or family. It likes to feed on my self-doubt and my insecurities about my connections with others, the feeling that if people knew the real me, they wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me. Sometimes, loneliness and I will lie in bed together on those weekend mornings, sharing coffee companionably, like lovers.
The difference between being alone and being lonely is an important one. Loneliness makes us feel something is wrong. Simply being alone and not lonely doesn’t. When I’m lonely, I feel a pressure to be elsewhere, to feel better about myself by having people around me. My ego wants to be stroked. Specifically I want friends around me, people who know me well. We all know that feeling of being lonelier in a crowd of strangers than we would be if we were actually alone. Loneliness makes us want to seek out companionship and support. Perhaps loneliness is rooted in that ancient feeling of the hunted, that being alone makes us vulnerable to attack
As a 41-year-old woman who lives alone and has no kids, loneliness takes on a very particular cast. If I let it, it will whisper to me that something is terribly wrong with me because I’m not in a long-term relationship, don’t have a lot of close friends. It will remind me of the times I’ve tried to connect and been rejected; it will tell me that other people can’t be trusted. It’s almost as if loneliness, in these instances, is feeling lonely itself and wants to make sure I stay to keep it company.
But is there really anything wrong with loneliness? Can we make friends with it?
As with all emotional states, loneliness lets us know something about ourselves. In this case, it lets us know that we crave connection, and that other people are important to us. If we listen closely, loneliness will even let us know what sort of connection we crave. For myself, it’s deeper connection, rather than surface conversations that never get to the heart of things. I can feel incredibly lonely talking with someone when I can’t seem to find a way to go deeper with them. So the message loneliness has for me is to seek deeper connections with people.
About a month ago, I returned from Burning Man. Prior to leaving for my trip, I was so busy I could barely see straight. I was getting ready for the trip, hanging out with friends, excitedly planning and anticipating the experience. After I returned, things slowed down socially, as I knew they would, and I felt lonely again. I’ve been spending the last month or so getting to know loneliness again, realizing that the intensity of loneliness is directly related to the intensity of connection I’ve experienced. So, sitting here at my kitchen table on a grey Sunday, feeling lonely, I realize that loneliness is also telling me that I have felt strong connection with others.
Loneliness is the flip side of feeling connected. As with joy and sorrow, we can’t feel one without the other. If we can’t feel loneliness, we may very well not feel connection, either. Can we sit with loneliness the way we sit with the dusk, knowing that we can’t have sunny days without also having dark nights? Can we develop a comfortable relationship with loneliness, understand what it’s trying to tell us, and not act on the urge to make it go away at any cost? Try it the next time you feel lonely. Invite it in for a bit, even if just for a moment. Ask it what it wants to tell you. And listen to the answer.
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