Shamelessly Belonging to Ourselves

The only choice we have in this wild and precious life

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Tell me, what is it you plan to do

With your one wild and precious life?

- Mary Oliver

Here’s the thing,

We won’t die wishing we’d been more like someone else

We’ll die wishing we had been more of who we are

-unless we boldly, shamelessly belong to ourselves.

Then is this not the only choice we have in this one wild and precious life?

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Belonging to ourselves is a continuum of awakening to and disentangling from who we are not.

For many of us this means starting with disentangling from:

Being ‘nice’

Being modest and mediocre

Trying to fit in

And instead:

Honouring the fluctuations of our emotions and our capacity

Fully inhabiting our unique brilliance and beauty and daring to be seen for it

Being willing to feel alone while recalibrating to bravery and truth

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Telling myself (and others) the truth about how I’m feeling and what my limitations are, is infinitely liberating.

It means ‘nice’ has no place.

Because ‘nice’ is where I was turning away from myself, hoping to present as a ‘good’ person.

‘Nice’ was a manifestation of the void in me.

The void that, instead of tending to with love, I conveniently ignored, because admitting there was a gaping hole in my being, would mean facing how defective and unworthy I was (or so I thought).

I poured beauty product after self-development course after cute little dress into the void, exhausting my being and my bank balance.

Disentangling from ‘niceness’ meant I finally got to hear the deep longing of my heart - to be seen and embraced for who I really am, while daring to believe I could be enough.

Instead of making choices in people and products from an energy of lack, I cultivated boundaries and discernment.

And big fat bonus: I brought my edges back on board and stopped feeling like a boring bitch.

Inhabiting my unique brilliance and beauty meant disentangling from modesty as some kind of virtue and refusing to live a mediocre life.

(While I speak of beauty in this context, it does not pertain to aesthetic quality but internal essence, I know I’m stating the obvious)

Modesty is the suffocation of our full expression.

Modesty is settling for mediocrity - at best.

It’s the societal pressure to be complicit in smallness, complicit in quietness and being apologetic about our existence (hello being born a woman).

I believe ‘modesty’ is in opposition to humility.

Humility is to embrace the unique beauty and brilliance that is God-given to us, to honour our gifts with everything we have, in deep reverence for this precious life.

Humility is daring to be seen for our brilliance and beauty, even if it feels cringe at first.

Daring to be seen for what I’m truly made of feels vulnerable but it’s a non-negotiable, because I’m devoted to shamelessly belonging to myself.

I quickly learned if I was to consistently make and share my art and be brave and true throughout the process, I needed an unprecedented resilience to accompany me.

So I called upon a permission piece I’d never heard uttered anywhere on the internet: