Should You Dare to Be Yourself?

0

be you very wellFor a good year or so of my life, I wanted to be Gretchen Rubin, the bestselling author of The Happiness Project. I had coffee with her a few months before our books came out (both were published the first week of January, 2010). Hers became an instant New York Times bestseller. She appeared on Today and the rest of the morning shows and was in demand as a keynote speaker at prestigious conferences around the country. Mine, well, didn’t make the bestsellers list and getting press was rather challenging on a bleak topic.

I wanted to be Gretchen for all the obvious reasons. A graduate of Yale and Yale Law School, she is incredibly bright and ambitious. A social media genius, she has mastered the blog platform. But there was more. I wanted to swap her message—no, her everything–for mine because I was sick of being Ms. Embrace-the-Darkness, the girl to know if you want to slit your wrist. Instead I wanted to be Susie Sunshine, your guide to happily ever after. Because that’s what the world wants, not Debbie Downer.

“To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody but yourself-means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight—and never stop fighting,” wrote E. E. Cummings.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s version is this: “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

I run into this conflict a few times a day.

Two weeks ago a very bright woman who was part of Group Beyond Blue, the online support group I moderate, thought that there should be someone, a mental health profession, to hold people accountable for their negative thinking on the site. The group was dangerous, in her opinion, because all of the venting was becoming toxic. She challenged everyone to not complain for a day.

I sat with this a few days and struggled.

I wanted to be Gretchen again.

But I’m not Gretchen.

I couldn’t appease her because, if I’ve succeeded at one thing in the last ten years since my breakdown, it’s being honest with myself and becoming as real as the Velveteen Rabbit. Not that The Happiness Project isn’t real. But Gretchen’s universe is radically different from my world. What I call a success is getting through an entire day without death thoughts or tears. I mark those pages of my mood journal with a fat smiley face. I’ve had four in 2014! It may seem a pathetic goal to most people—it’s definitely not material for the Today show–but it’s my reality, and, if I can pull off a Buddhist stunt, I’m okay with that.

It was like the time I was preparing a commencement address for my alma mater, Saint Mary’s College. My first draft was from the heart, about how falling on your butt is sometimes the best thing you can do, because, as Leonard Cohen writes in his lyrics for “Anthem”: “There’s a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

A friend of mine read it and told me it was depressing.

“Not to hurt your feelings, but those kids need something to inspire them, and this isn’t it,” she told me.

So I wrote the Gretchen Rubin version, more happiness and less despair.

I sent it off to my former professor, the one who nominated me for this honor. In response, he quoted St. Francis de Sales: “Be you very well.” In other words, I wasn’t selected for this task so that I could compose a literary masterpiece chock full of well-researched recommendations on living a happy life. Knowing a little about my journey, he wanted my story, which he thought would speak to the students.

I went back to my first draft, and then wrote 75 versions of that until I was happy.

“Nothing important, or meaningful, or beautiful, or interesting, or great, ever came out of imitations,” writes Anna Quindlen in her book, Being Perfect. “What is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the world of becoming yourself.

That means being me, not Gretchen.

Artwork by the talented Anya Getter.

Originally published on Sanity Break at Everyday Health.

 

Share this:

Therese Borchard
I am a writer and chaplain trying to live a simple life in Annapolis, Maryland.

More about me...


FOLLOW ME

SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER



Recent

February 23, 2024
Beloved
November 24, 2023
Everything Is Grace: Cultivating Gratitude From a Greater Altitude
June 11, 2023
Do One Thing Every Day That Scares You
May 20, 2023
Please Let Me Cry
February 16, 2023
Love Being Loving

Related Posts

11 Responses
  1. Donna

    Hi Teresa!

    I am finding that the struggle to be myself and the struggle to be something I am not but what others want, is my greatest challenge at this point. I have tried to be what everyone expects of me that parts of me are so deep inside I have trouble pulling them into the light. I have a wonderful therapist and I am working on being who I am and being proud of it. It’s not what my parents want me to be, because they don’t understand the true me. I love the quotation “Be yourself. Everyone else it taken.” from Oscar Wilde. I try to remember this everyday. Be who you are! You are not all black and white, you have multiple shades of grey. Everyone does. You are smarter, stronger and more beautiful than you think you are. I need to keep hope alive, as something to strive for through my challenges. Without hope, I don’t think I can go on. The day I lose hope and stop trying to be better, I know I will be in big trouble. Everyone has struggles of one kind or another. Please reach out for help, don’t let your struggles kill you.

  2. Barbara Markway

    I can so relate to this! My books were on shyness, social anxiety, with some depression thrown in for good measure, based a lot on my own personal experience. Oh how I hated doing publicity related to that topic! Wouldn’t it be fun to have a topic like happiness to write about! So cool that you got to have lunch with Gretchen Rubin. She is very good at her social media. Once she commented on something I said on her blog and she told me to Be Barb! And by the way, I’d love to have lunch with you someday! Who knows, anything could happen.

  3. IN HOC SIGNO VINCES

    Tell the Prince of Darkness & Depression and Princess of Anxiety/Angst to stay outside your Mindful Door…..They will not be allowed to mess around with you today. They will come again and You will deflect them again. Creative Strategy and Tricks. All they have to do is make the rounds on All Hallows Eve. They will not have much to do the next day. All Saints Day, but you do.

  4. Therese,
    I’d be honored to hear or read your commencement speech.
    Another perspective professes that each person, each life, has a unique purpose, designed by our Creator. Discovering and being true to that purpose can take a lifetime, and is all the harder when we resist the call, resent the suffering, aiknd allow envy to blind us and lead ulj. s astray.
    I’m still wondering in the desert, searching. I don’t know your calling, but you’re incredibly blessed with gifts to lead others to a more peaceful place, help relieve suffering, and courageously articulate you