I honestly can’t remember a time in my childhood when I felt comfortable in my own skin. I’ve had to work pretty hard for that and only now as I am on the tail-end of the third decade of my life am I starting to embrace the full spectrum of the being that I am. Not that that’s always a graceful or seamless process even these days.
I still feel like I talk too much and manage to pull off astounding levels of awkwardness in some of the most seemingly straightforward social situations. For anyone who has ever seen me as “cool” for even a brief moment in time, God love you. To me the essence of true coolness is being so deeply secure in who you are that you just radiate ease and warmth. No need to judge others or to get too ruffled by anything anyone does because you just love and accept who you are and are therefore able to extend the same grace to others.
I work on this practice daily. It’s a mix of shadow work, radical self love, and authentic embodiment work and I don’t imagine I’ll ever run out of material to dig into.
I can remember coming home from school in first grade, marching upstairs and into the bathroom, and climbing right up onto the sink so I could get as close to the mirror as possible.
I would look not really at but into myself. I would search for who I was inside the little shell of a girl who never felt like her spirit matched the body she was given for this go round.
I sometimes stared into the mirror for so long that my features would stop making any sense and I’d no longer be completely sure which side of the mirror I was even on.
I started a new school at the beginning of sixth grade and decided that, since I wouldn’t know a soul there, it was my chance to try a different version of myself on for size.
On my first day of school, when my teacher called my name during roll, I raised my hand and told her with a nonchalant smile that, “I actually go by Dottie.”
She seemed confused and I said something vague about it being a family nickname and that no one calls me “Ashley”.
I’m still not sure how, at 10 years old, I was able to summon enough bravado to tell such a lie with a completely straight face, but my teacher either bought it or decided to just forgo trying to sort through what was going on with the odd little new student in her class and for the rest of that year, I was “Dottie”.
The next year my father moved my sister and me out to the outskirts of Houston where we lived part time in a commune and part time with the mother of one of my dad’s friends while he lived in an apartment in downtown Houston. I never saw anyone from my sixth grade class again, but all of the farewell notes from my friends in my yearbook from that year say things like, “See you next year, Dottie!” and “Have a great summer, Dottie!”.
I guess if I ran into any of my friends from that school on the street today, I would still be “Dottie” to them.
I’m not sure that my family ever really fully knew about my little sixth grade social experiment. My dad did seem somewhat bemused when friends from school would call our house and ask for “Dottie”, but I just told him that it was just something friends from school called me.
At home, to him and my sister and any of the other cast of characters that might be living with us at any given time, I was always “Ashley”.
I never tried to change my name again but that certainly wasn’t the end of my identity exploration.
From high school to college to the handful of years working odd jobs post-graduation and even into my time in graduate school, I shaped-shifted time and time again.
I jumped from one social group to another, tapping into different parts of myself within the context of each scene.
Each version was a slice of the truth. But when you build friendships based on only a fraction of who you are, they often stop feeling like a fit once the full range of your being starts seeping through. And it always does eventually.
It took years for me to stop playing the roles of whoever it was that I thought people wanted me to be and to just start allowing the full weight of who I actually am to land and to be willing to deal with the consequences of that.
But what a relief it was to finally stop trying to keep so much of myself tucked in.
I still have moments where I catch myself in the mirror and wonder who is in there, behind the eyes inside this vessel that still doesn’t always feel like mine.
The difference now though is that the question feels lighter because I know the answer will never be one thing. And that I don’t need to go searching for myself.
I’m right here. I’ve always been right here.
All I needed to do was create space for my truth to come through and then welcome every bit of it in, without exception, when it does.
