Do you live authentically or to please others?
Have you ever found yourself in a conversation, maybe around the dinner table, at coffee, in a lecture or classroom, at work, at a family gathering, and you're slinking back in your chair, eyes wide and averting contact, lips firmly pressed together, mind buzzing?
Or even closer to home - unable to have a potentially difficult or vulnerable conversation with your partner, best friend, parent, or loved one?
It can be hard to know what to say. It can be hard to know what the right and acceptable thing to say is. It can be confusing to know what the intelligent and wise thing to say is. It can be hard to know if what you're thinking of saying is valid, dumb, or even offensive. It can be hard to know how what you say might be received by others.
What if you get cancelled? What if you start an argument? What if you hurt someone you love? What if you ruin an opportunity? What if you rock the boat? What if you realise you didn't know as much as you thought you did?
We have two basic needs that often seem to come into conflict with each other: attachment and authenticity.
What I mean by attachment is really the sense and actuality of belonging, healthy relationships, to be loved and known and accepted and taken care of and having the opportunity to take care of others.
What I mean by authenticity is the ability to be able to connect to what you're feeling, to what you know, to what is happening in you and around you, your needs and desires, no matter how you interpret them, and be able to express them rather than suppress them in any given situation.
Dr Gabor Maté said:
"Do I live my life according to my own deepest truths, or in order to fulfil someone else's expectations? How much of what I have believed and done is actually my own, and how much has been in service to a self-image I originally created in the belief it was necessary to please my parents?"
Or to please a social standard, a religious community, the concept of God, a partner or a friend or a family or a boss or an educator?
There's a story in Matthew's memoir, in chapter 16, where Jesus asks his friends what people are saying about him. They tell him what they've heard, all the different variations. And then Jesus asks Peter who he says he is. It's a poignant moment when Peter answered:
"You're the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of the living God." *
And then Jesus said a whole bunch of things, and ever since, others have said a whole bunch of things about rocks and building and churches and Peter and knowing God and all of it. And I always wonder what Jesus would have said if Peter had said something different.
For the sake of this series, I want to focus on the fact that Jesus encouraged Peter to say what he thought, what he believed; to give voice to what was happening inside him, to the revelations that he was having, to the concepts and ideas that he was stringing together.
Because in it all, Divinity can hold the tension between what you know and what you don't know and what you're discovering in between and how you need to verbally process the, well, process.
Was the point that Peter gave the right answer? Or was it that Peter gave his voice?
I've borrowed the name of this series from an episode of Rob Bell's podcast titled the same thing: Quote Yourself. It's a series about learning to say what you think, even if what you think is not fully formed, even if you're afraid that what you think might be wrong. We're going to journey down the pathways of owning thyself, and using thy own voice, and allowing ourselves to be in flux along the way.
I wonder what you might say, here and now, today, with everything that you know and don't know, the things you've been through and the hopes you have about tomorrow, if Jesus were to ask you:
Who do you say I am?
The point is not to think about an acceptable answer, the right answer, the most pleasing one, a line that you've heard someone else say, or a paragraph of words that don't really say much but keep from offending anyone, and just say what you actually believe.
Come on this journey with me… I think it might be fun.
MINDFUL PROMPT: "When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak." - Audre Lorde.
From this week’s series "Quote Yourself", with a subscription, in the App.
Written by Liz Milani
Instagram: @thepracticeco
