In Search of Oneself, or "Walking the Ever-Present Tight-Rope Between Extremes"

More and more these days, I see blog posts, comments, and quotes to “be yourself.” If you Google the phrase, you might see that WikiHow even has an article on “How To Be Yourself: 10 Helpful Tips.” A quote frequently made into a fancy picture and posted all over Pinterest is “Life is too short to be anyone but yourself.” Oscar Wilde famously said, “Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.” On Facebook, I often see Ralph Waldo Emerson’s statement, “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

As a pre-teen, I compiled a running list of inspirational quotes that I liked—from “When you were born, the world rejoiced and you cried. Live your life in such a way that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice,” to “Turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones.” My thirty-two page Word document full of junior high quotes is notably lacking in “be yourself” lines, however, and I find that to this day, statements to that effect make me feel vaguely uncomfortable. Being a person who doesn’t like feeling uncomfortable without understanding why or analyzing where that feeling is coming from, I’ve spent some small portion of time considering the matter. For me, it all comes down to one underlying issue:

To “be yourself” is often an excuse to not be any better than you are right now.

There are times when the sentiment to “be yourself” is perfectly valid and one that I hope my daughters will understand as they grow older. I don’t want them to do something just because someone else pressures them into it. Is it so bad, however, to emulate another person that you admire? Is it wrong to recognize your own deficiencies, look around, and see someone else who seems to have found a way to conquer that issue? Who are we if not composites of our own nature, the nurture we have received, the grace of God, and the influence of those around us? Charles Colton, an English cleric and writer, once said, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”

Flattery or not, my problem with the “be yourself” movement isn’t that it’s wrong to dance to your own beat, nor is it the idea that everyone has something to give to the world. It isn’t that we each are uniquely and fearfully made in the image of God, either. Where I take issue with the movement is when it strays from celebrating God’s creativity in forming us and skips over the line to deceiving ourselves and our friends that there is no need to improve ourselves. That to change or decide to do something out of *our* norm is to betray who we really are. Frankly, I see a lot of things in myself that are, well, myself. Just because they are parts of who I am doesn’t mean that’s who I should be or who I want to be, though. Just because I am naturally introverted doesn’t mean I am meant to live a self-pampering lifestyle where I never push myself out of my box. It means being aware of my limitations, celebrating the unique way God made me, and pushing myself to be better. Whether being better means taking the time I know I need by myself to rejuvenate or looking at a situation and deciding that this is a time while yes, I might be tired, and yes, I might want to go home and curl up with a book by myself to recharge, this time I need to stay and pour myself into this group of people—it takes judgment and wisdom.

As a child and teenager, one of my defining characteristics was a thirst for betterment—an insatiable desire for knowledge. I see it in my oldest daughter now and marvel at the wonder and curiosity she has for the world—yet I know that once, I asked those same questions. Once, I pushed myself beyond what was required of me to learn more about the world around me. It’s why I studied Arabic on my own from the time I was 10 until I 15, and why I took a class when I was 15 to learn more. It’s why I read book after book after book about Martin Luther, King Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Victoria, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and more. It’s why I spent a summer trying to learn American Sign Language when I was eleven. It’s why I begged my Mom to let me fit eight sciences into six years of junior high and high school, and it’s why I spent a year doing Rosetta Stone Chinese as a twelve year old. It’s why I pushed myself to journal even when I disliked putting the time into writing or pushing past the discomfort in my wrist from all the penmanship—I wanted to write about where I was at so that someday, I could look back and not forget where I had come from.

College changed this for a few years. Between sickness, marriage, children, work, and full-time studies with lots of reading, my desire to push myself beyond what was required went out the window. Any reading outside of school was nonexistent. The thought of extra language studies was a joke. Reading for pleasure became reading sub-par fluffy books that were finished in less than two hours. Only now, a year out from finishing my degree (four and a half years after I started), am I finding my interest in the world returning. Only now have I really begun to look around and study ways to live better again, to work better, to be better. Now I am reading again, searching again, digging in again to see what parts of who I am I like and what parts I need to change.

In the past, I have seen something on Facebook or the web in general and have not followed through on it simply because I did not think of it first. (Yes, I am ashamed to admit it.) At other points, I have felt pressured to do something simply because a truly inspirational blog made it sound wonderful and that’s what everyone else is doing. Is either extreme right? No. Choosing to follow an idea that demands I “be myself” at the cost of not improving myself is not a movement I want to be part of. Similarly, I don’t want to go to the opposite extreme and feel judged or less than worthy because I have not done something in one area as well as another person did or because I went my own way in a certain area. I want to—I need to—find and walk the line between the two, where I celebrate how God made me (quirks and all) yet where I am open to learning from those around me. I want to change for the sake of improvement rather than pressure or the sake of change itself. I want to be honest enough with myself and others that I can admit I do not have it all together and that there is a lot to learn from those who are or have been in similar situations. (Sometimes, there’s even something to be learned from someone who’s never been in any situation remotely like what I might be going through—now that is humbling.)

This is where I see Ecclesiastes coming in*. Today, the world is all about expressing yourself. Being yourself. Loving yourself and who you are. In moderation and with understanding, these are wonderful ideals. Being yourself is not where it ends, though. It is not the whole story. Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 says, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something new’? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. No one remembers former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.” Is it not the height of arrogance and conceit to imagine I can do it myself without incorporating things I think are laudable from those around me? Are we not to learn from those who have gone before us? Should we not learn from those around us and gain from their successes and failures? How can one person possibly expect to think of every good idea? Who are we if not composites?

Today’s world tells us our significance comes in how well we stand out, in how true we are to ourselves. That begs the question—how true to yourself do you want to be? Should you be “true to yourself” if your self is a selfish, unkind person?  Where should your sense of significance be coming from? From a misplaced idea that seeing a good thing and incorporating it into who you are is denying yourself? Or from an equally faulty assumption that you have to be like everyone else to have value?

I am Melanie. I am a third-culture kid who grew up in three countries. I am the product of dozens of cultures and centuries of history. I am twenty-four years old. I am the wife of the man I never dared dream about but always hoped for regardless. I am a mother to two living, beautiful, and wonderfully curious girls and the mother to two infants who died before birth. I am a certified teacher but a lifelong learner. I am the child who followed elderly people in Europe pretending they were the grandparents I rarely got to see, and the mother who now revels in the time my children have with their own four grandparents. I am the girl who studied nine languages, only ever spoke three well, and now feels like I can’t articulate myself well in any. I am the introvert with a heart for hospitality but who struggles with sharing myself with others. I am the girl who has to push herself to think critically because I find myself so easily intimidated by others more smart than I—it’s so much easier to simply tell someone, “Well, I haven’t thought about it much” than to take the time to think about an issue, explain my thoughts to someone, put myself out there, and then deal with any hurt or frustration if they have better thoughts on the subject than I or can articulate themselves better. I am a sinner saved by grace and a woman seeking Christ.

I am “myself.”  I hope that in being myself—in being the woman God uniquely crafted—I come to incorporate the urgency to better myself as part of who I am. I hope that I am never content with who I am, but at the same time can rest in whose I am. I pray that I will not lose sight of the need to better myself (whether in knowledge, patience, graciousness, kindness, compassion, intelligence, courage, or anything else) while realizing that God can use me as I am. I am not perfect and I never will be perfect. In the end, though, what is important?

1.       That I am willing to be used by God no matter what.

2.       That I accept what I cannot change.

3.       That I prioritize what I can change because I cannot change it all at once.

4.       That I push myself to grow in those areas, and

5.       Through it all, that I celebrate the way God made me and the unique ways He can use me.

Reinhold Niebuhr says it far more eloquently:

God, give me grace to accept with serenity

The things that cannot be changed,

Courage to change the things

Which should be changed,

And the wisdom to distinguish

The one from the other.

Living one day at a time,

Enjoying one moment at a time

Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace;

Taking, as Jesus did,

This sinful world as it is,

Not as I would have it;

Trusting that You will make all things right,

If I surrender to Your will,

So that I may be reasonably happy in this life

And supremely happy with You forever in the next.

Amen.

* I am not a learned scholar and I often find myself mistaken. I hope anything I say is taken to the scripture and held up against it to test my words against Scripture's veracity.

Hostile Territory

When I became pregnant with our oldest child a month after getting married at the beginning of my junior year of college, I had to fight for her life. Not physically, but verbally. I had to fight for her right to life, for recognition of the beauty her new life was. Surprisingly, some of her biggest critics were students and professors at my small Christian school. From snide comments about a “rush wedding” (I would hardly call a wedding planned a year in advance “rushed”) to questions asking me “Just how many days pregnant are you, anyway? And how many days have you been married?” I began dreading people finding out about my pregnancy.

I recall one professor late in my pregnancy asking me when my due date was. When I told him, he looked at me and told me about a young couple he knew who had gotten pregnant immediately following their wedding day. Their baby was born a month early with a normal birth weight, and everyone wondered if the couple had lied about the actual due date to cover up their sin. He then lowered his glasses, looked me straight in the eye, and, raising one eyebrow, told me that he hoped our baby didn’t show up early because “you know what everyone is going to think!”

I became a bit of a scandal on campus, with those not knowing me assuming I was pregnant and not married (“*gasp* Did you hear we have a pregnant class president?!” “Really?! Why hasn’t the administration kicked her out?!”—true conversation overheard) and those marginally knowing me wondering a) had I gotten pregnant before we got married and b) why was I throwing my life and career away by having a baby so soon after marriage—and still in school?!

The focus on the potential negative aspects of my pregnancy came as a shock to me. For one thing, I was at a conservative Christian college where children are purportedly celebrated. Secondly, even if the timing wasn’t ideal, why was there so much focus and insinuation rather than support or encouragement?

The negativity from students and professors didn’t stop with my pregnancy, however, or with believers. Soon after giving birth, hormones amuck and me struggling to figure out the world of caring for a child, I would venture out in public and be stopped by all manner of people. Strangers would comment on how beautiful she was and then warn me, “Enjoy it now—it won’t last and soon you’ll be wishing she was a newborn again!” or “You think it’s hard now—just wait until it really gets hard.” When she started talking and I posted about it on Facebook, rather than excited comments, I received ones saying, “Just wait a little bit longer and you’ll be wishing she would STOP talking” and “Trust me—it won’t be long and you won’t be quite so excited!!”

As a mom in the middle of the night, sleep-deprived, baby tugging at me and husband sleeping across the room, I recall sobbing as I remembered several old-time mothers who told me to “Cherish every moment. Before you know it, your baby is grown up and out of the house and you are left all alone.” Yikes! Already highly emotional and wrapping my exhausted mind around the fact that I had a child, I was picturing her going away to college…getting married…having children…and then me standing there at her gravesite. I know that some of those moms were trying to be helpful and encourage me to not let other things get in the way over prioritizing my children, but the strenuous nature in which they told me their own stories and emphasized how fast life goes and how much regret you have later only served to deepen my post-partum despair and guilt.

Since that point I have had another live child (now a healthy almost-two-year-old) and two miscarriages at 5 weeks and a baby boy at 16 weeks.  I have grown hesitant to post things on Facebook and think critically about every general status I post regarding my children, wondering warily, “Is there someone who is going to tell me, “Just wait until….”? (I can’t even count the number of people who have told me some variant of, “Just wait until they’re teenagers and then you’ll wish they had never been born.”)

 Similarly, there is a mommies’ group that I am a part of where I have grown careful about what I post. Many moms post funny stories from their day, but the few times I have or the many times I have read another mom’s post, rather than fellow mothers commenting with laughter or funny tie-ins of their own, many post unsolicited advice or tell you that “You know you don’t really have to do _________ that way.” Where is the encouragement? The camaraderie? The rejoicing with those who rejoice? Why all this judgment and negativity?

Rachel Jankovic succinctly states, "Everywhere you go, people want to talk about your children. Why you shouldn’t have had them, how you could have prevented them, and why they would never do what you have done. They want to make sure you know that you won’t be smiling anymore when they are teenagers. All this at the grocery store, in line, while your children listen."

I understand the secular world taking issue with my children. I understand that I come from a different place in how I view the gift of my girls. I don’t understand believers’ negativity, and I don’t understand believers’ discouragement towards other mothers. Yes, sometimes your experiences can help another mother. Sometimes you need to share the ugly details. Life isn’t all picnics and dessert. But I can see very few situations where it is okay to throw out your own “Just wait until…” that detracts from a new mother’s delight in her children. Celebrate with her, rejoice with her. Encourage her. Very possibly yours might be the only outside source of encouragement she receives all day.

This author, in an article well-worth the read, summarizes my thoughts marvelously—much more succinctly and prettily than I could possibly. She includes quotes from several other women—my favourite being from Rachel Jankovic: “Christian mothers carry their children in hostile territory. When you are in public with them, you are standing with, and defending, the objects of cultural dislike. You are publicly testifying that you value what God values, and that you refuse to value what the world values. You stand with the defenseless and in front of the needy. You represent everything that our culture hates, because you represent laying down your life for another—and laying down your life for another represents the gospel.”