#day3 - for my college friends to giggle: I am me, I am ok

Just thinking today about how many people I've worked with over the years who are embarrassed or even ashamed of who they used to be at some younger age.  "I was a bully" or "I was a mean girl."  "I was slutty."  Or "I wasn't good to my mom and now she's gone."  "I was drunk."  "I lied."  The list goes on and on.

I've been doing research into the relationship between humor, play and grief and it reminds me of something I found recently:

Isn't Calvin the best?  Sometimes we are all like this - not accepting the past, and trying to change anything and everything out of our sheer will for control, and not seeing the reality that we're in.  

I'd like to propose that if you have a version of yourself from your past (even if it was yesterday), that you're not proud of - try to use a lighter touch with yourself.  I remember when I moved to DC after college and started wearing a lot of black and feeling I was very sophisticated, I became embarrassed of the Midwestern version of myself who wore Christmas sweatshirts and had a Virginia Satir poster on my college dorm wall (my East coast self thought that was WAY too sentimental).  Then,  I got older and became embarrassed of the posturing young adult who had to wear black to prove she was cool.  Now, I like both those girls.  They were doing their best to figure out "who am I?"  

I hope that you can go easy on you.  You may just have been trying to figure out who you were too.

Since I have no pretense of being cool anymore.  For your pleasure and in the immortal words of Virginia Satir

I am Me. In all the world, there is no one else exactly like me. Everything that comes out of me is authentically mine, because I alone chose it – I own everything about me: my body, my feelings, my mouth, my voice, all my actions, whether they be to others or myself.

 I own my fantasies, my dreams, my hopes, my fears. I own my triumphs and successes, all my failures and mistakes. Because I own all of me, I can become intimately acquainted with me. By so doing, I can love me and be friendly with all my parts.

I know there are aspects about myself that puzzle me, and other aspects that I do not know – but as long as I am friendly and loving to myself, I can courageously and hopefully look for solutions to the puzzles and ways to find out more about me.

However I look and sound, whatever I say and do, and whatever I think and feel at a given moment in time is authentically me. If later some parts of how I looked, sounded, thought, and felt turn out to be unfitting, I can discard that which is unfitting, keep the rest, and invent something new for that which I discarded.

 I can see, hear, feel, think, say, and do. I have the tools to survive, to be close to others, to be productive, and to make sense and order out of the world of people and things outside of me. I own me, and therefore, I can engineer me.

 I am me, and I am Okay.

 From Self Esteem by Virginia Satir