Un-Becoming

“Maybe the journey isn’t about becoming anything.
Maybe it’s about un-becoming everything that isn’t really you
so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.”
~ Unknown

Let me take you back to when you were a child. Better yet, take a few minutes to watch very young children at play. What you’ll see is an uninhibited, lack of filter in their actions and words. They soar across a room, not caring who’s watching. They speak their minds, not worrying they’ll be made fun of. They are truly free to be themselves on every level, from wearing a tutu at the grocery store to having a light-saber fight with themselves on a beach.

They are free. Un-becoming. But in a short period of time, when they start to notice people are judgmental, they become … someone they aren’t.

Do you remember when that moment happened to you? Was it a teacher, a bully at school or one at home? Was it someone who you looked up to who made you feel small and insignificant?

Really think about that moment your world switched from un-becoming to becoming. Because if you can figure that out, you’ll see the trigger that keeps you repeating old patterns of letting people trap you in boxes of their own design, not yours.

I’ll go one step further. Once you can define that person who shoved you into your first box, you might very well be able to identify why you keep choosing people who want to do the same. It’s what’s familiar. Like it or not, there’s comfort in familiarity, even dysfunctional familiarity.

And guess what? We also plant those insecurities directly into our writing. We might hold back from writing that too-personal story. Or perhaps we overprotect our main character because we relate to them too much, and subconsciously wish someone protected us.

But what if we pushed our characters right to the edge? What if we forced them to face their fears, to grab the person who has tortured them for years, and give them the power ... and words ... to rise about that pain? Better yet, let them use the pain to show us who they really are.

Who our readers hope they will become.

Because when we consume stories showing us the potential of emotional growth, we suddenly believe we can grow, too.

Maybe you're one of the lucky ones who had artist parents who encouraged you to create with reckless abandon, like set decorator Mindy Smith. I, too, was blessed to have a mother who abhorred forced conformity (you can read a fun story about how she disrupted our whole neighborhood with ... a sprinkler.)

Yet being the youngest of four kids—with dominating siblings—I wasn't quite as confident as my mother. But I found my quiet moments to rebel. I remember a teacher yelled at me in first grade because I was literally drawing outside of the coloring-book lines. You know what I did? I conformed ... until she turned away. Then I flipped my page over and drew a hot mess of a picture, before folding it up and proudly slipping it into my pocket.

While being free-spirited is a trait of childhood, many lose that freedom when the pressure to "fit in" hits hard in our young adult lives. But let me tell you one amazing thing about middle age. You have no fucks left to give.

Seriously. I used to desperately care what people thought of me. Until the day I realized the only opinion that matters is my own. Well, in truth, it wasn't one magical day. It was a series of years, paying attention to what put knots in my stomach and trying to retrain my brain to stop listening to the judgmental noise.

Finally, it hit me ... I cannot control what people think of me. The more I accepted that, the more I embraced not even caring what they thought. Talk about freedom!

That mindset slipped into my writing. I write the stories I want to read. Sure, our stories need to be marketable, but they need to be ones we have unbridled passion for, too.

The best stories take us in the most unexpected directions—shock us, move us, and feel authentic, even if that emotion hits painful nerves.

Don’t strive to be what everyone expects you to be. Be who you deserve to be. Be all you can be. In order to break those old habits, you need to not care if people judge you. Because they will judge you.

You have no control over the small, petty minds that inhabit our world.

The antidote to judgmental people is simply to believe in yourself. Let me tell you a secret: they hate that. They count on you not being strong enough to believe that you are good enough just the way you are.

I have a few favorite quotes from A.A. Milne, which speak to the importance of being brave enough to be you …

“The things that make me different are the things that make me.”

You are the only you who exists. You are the only one who can write those stories swirling in your mind. Your uniqueness, while it may not be what other people expect or want, is precisely what makes you, and your stories, special.

Some people don’t want you to shine because they’re afraid you’ll overshadow them, so they keep you trapped in that box, suffocating. Dying. Choking.

If you believe their gaslighting and willingly stay hidden from the world, it is both a loss for you as well as your readers.

And the other quote:

“You can’t stay in your corner of the Forest waiting
for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.”

Stepping out of the shadows and ripping off your veneer is scary. But I hope you can peel one layer off at a time to un-become and proudly reclaim who you really are.

Let that uninhibited child out. Come out, come out, wherever you are. Un-become and be free.

How about I join you. I’ll meet you by the swing set. I’ll be the one with a box of crayons, wearing a tutu.

*Feature photo by Fröken Fokus (Pexels)