Some People Think I’m a Jerk and Some Think I’m a Saint
By: Elle Beau
Tags: Self-awareness, Self Improvement, Spiritual Growth, Self, Life

Living out loud means finding your own sense of self

Photo by Duncan Sanchez on Unsplash

My mother, rest her soul, thought that I hung the moon. She believed I was the best daughter who had ever lived, and I tried very hard to live up to that standard and be worthy of her belief. I took care of her the last six months of her life and it was quite possibly the hardest thing I’ve ever done, even more difficult than raising a non-verbal autistic son. But I tried to do it with a smile and to not let her know just how taxing it all was because I really wanted to be extra good to her those last several months.

My husband has told me repeatedly how impressed he was with my patience and stamina in the face of such a difficult job. My mom’s friends have told me the same. But before you think that I’m just tooting my own horn or that I really am some kind of saintly figure, I also have to tell you that I know there are times when I’m also kind of a jerk. I know that at times I’m more than a little bit pedantic, and sometimes even self-involved. I have plenty of room for improvement and I know myself well enough to know that I’m a flawed human, just like everyone else.

A remember quite clearly the time a couple of years ago when a guy I was talking to in the comments section of some Medium story told me I was “a dick.” It made me laugh because I’ve never been called that before, but it also made me laugh because I knew it wasn’t true. I wasn’t being rude to him or treating his feelings as if they didn’t matter, but I was adeptly refuting what he was asserting, and I guess he didn’t really like that. Because I do know myself pretty well, I was able to judge whether or not to take his words to heart. In that case, I didn’t.

In my life coach training, we were taught to listen to the things that other people had to say about us, but then to run them through the lens of our own filters — filters that we were always honing — to determine whether there was any truth to the input. Many times other people do see us more clearly than we can see ourselves in a particular moment and it’s good to take that input on and see how you can use it constructively. At other times, people are just being mean or are blinded by their own stuff, and we should simply disregard their opinion of us altogether. Sometimes it’s a little bit of both. But how do you know the difference?

The only way to get good at making that distinction is to get better and better at knowing yourself. The more that your sense of self comes from the inside and not from the people around you, the better off you are. Getting to really know yourself means feeling more comfortable owning your strong suits, and not feeling like you are bragging if you do so. But it also means getting to know your shadow side as well.

The shadow is the parts of ourselves that we have disavowed because we’ve gotten messaging somewhere along the line that these parts are unacceptable. These may be traits that are more widely seen as unseemly such as “bitchiness” or ones that fit more into the category of “who do you think you are?” The shadow is the parts of ourselves that we try to hide so that we’ll look not only “good” but so that we will better conform to the society around us.

Hiding our shadow selves and pretending that we only have socially acceptable traits makes people suffer from inauthenticity and the exhaustion that comes from always wearing a mask to hide your real self. But it also means that we can never be actually whole and healthy because it is only when we can integrate those parts of ourselves that we truly figure out who we are and we can love the entire package.

Shadow work is uncomfortable, particularly in a culture that teaches us to always compare ourselves to everyone around us in order to determine who is in the one-up position. When you start competing against yourself instead and who you’ve been in the past, rather than trying to compare yourself to everyone else, that’s when your locus of control can come more from the inside. This is often easier said than done, and I won’t pretend that I haven’t gotten my feelings hurt at times even by a stranger’s unflattering opinion of me.

Of course, other people’s opinions shouldn’t be entirely discounted, but as Brene Brown has pointed out, there has to be a balance.

When we stop caring about what people think, we lose our capacity for connection. When we become defined by what people think, we lose our willingness to be vulnerable. If we dismiss all the criticism, we lose out on important feedback, but if we subject ourselves to the hatefulness, our spirits gets crushed.

Her advice is to only value the opinions of the people you know that you can really trust — people who love you warts and all but who also see the ways that you shine. Those are the people to seek counsel from on the days when your own filters are feeling a little bit gunky and you’re not sure if you are reading the situation correctly or not. There have been plenty of times when I’ve asked someone I trust to tell me if I’d done something that was out of line or if I was misreading a situation because, although I trust my own instincts, I also know that they are not infallible. My perception of something may indeed be skewed because I look at the world through Elle-colored glasses, just as you also look through your own lenses.

One of the main benefits of life coaching for the client is to have the opinion of someone who is both on your side and not attached to any particular outcome. They can provide a kind of mirror for the client to better see themselves within a safe environment. I always want my clients to have what they want and not what I want, but I also provide a different perspective at times just to help them see how it resonates.

I always tell clients that whenever I give my opinion about something, it’s for the purposes of them bouncing off of it to see if they agree or disagree. Does what I’m saying resonate for them or does it help them to get clearer about their own position that is entirely different? Either outcome is fine because it’s helping the client to better know their own heart and mind, and that is what we are both after.

For this reason, I have people who perform this same service for me, both in formal settings that I pay for and in more informal ones between friends. It is through this continual honing of my thoughts, beliefs, values, and perspectives that I have gotten to know more about my strengths and my challenges. I know a lot about the places in my life where I’d like to do better, but I also see how far I’ve come in the past 15 years of doing this kind of work.

Knowing myself in this way is what has allowed me to live more out loud as well. Before I started on this journey of self-discovery, I mostly wore plain, solid color clothes that helped me to not stand out. As the tallest girl in my class, I’d gotten a lot of unwanted attention about my height and I guess I was looking for ways to just sort of blend in, even though that wasn’t actually possible. But once I started to get to know who I really was, and stopped worrying so much about who I was supposed to be (a less tall woman), I started to discover that I liked different things.

I began to wear clothing with a bit more pattern and flair. After a while, I decided that I wanted to get some tattoos, and now I have 6. Getting a visible tattoo at age 50 when no other women in my neighborhood had one was not a big deal for me because I wasn’t trying to be like them. Nor was I trying to be different from them. I was just trying to be me. The same goes for when I started to dye my hair pink or wear blue nail polish. I wasn’t trying to be younger or to stand out. It’s just something that felt like self-expression for me, and perhaps that’s why so many people have responded well to it, telling me how much they like my hair, in particular.

But again, as nice as that affirmation is to receive, it’s mostly not relevant. I’m sure there are plenty of people who don’t like my hair, but who have simply kept it to themselves. I like it, (and my husband and other lovers like it too), and that’s what matters. Which brings me to the subject of polyamory. If I’d never gotten to really know myself, I would have never guessed in a million years that I would want to embrace a polyamorous lifestyle. Now I can’t imagine living in any other way because it just feels so right and natural to me.

Maybe that’s not something that is right for everyone, but that’s the point. People should figure out what really works for them and then do that — something that might be quite different from person to person. So much of what we do and think comes out of the subconscious — a place that is filled with childhood training, cultural narratives, stereotypes, and other kinds of indoctrination that may or may not be what we truly think and believe if we were to confront it. Cognitive scientists say that only about 2% of thought is truly conscious

Doing the hard work of questioning all that stuff and really grappling with it to see if for instance, the stories in your head around money are actually your own or if they come from someplace else like your parents or your culture, is an important aspect of individuation. And once you know more of those things about yourself, once you can discern more of the time what is you and what is coming from the outside somewhere, the easier it is to live authentically and boldly — what I like to call living out loud.

That doesn’t have to involve polyamory or pink hair, but it does mean letting yourself be seen in ways that may or may not fit exactly in with who you might have been taught you were supposed to be. When you’ve really befriended that person and then some stranger calls you a dick, you’ll know whether or not to laugh at it. You’ll be a lot less bothered that some people see you as a jerk, because you know that the possibility does exist, and you’ll be a lot less flattered by the people who see you as some kind of two-dimensional angel.

I love it when the people I care about see me in much the way that I see myself with both the good and the I’m working on it parts. I’d prefer that strangers see that same mix too, because “I see you” is a deep compliment not just in the movie Avatar, but in real life as well. But I don’t expect that they always will, and most of the time, that’s OK with me, because I see myself, and that’s what matters the most.

© Copyright Elle Beau 2020

Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love. If this story is appearing anywhere other than Medium.com, it appears without my consent and has been stolen.