I recently wrote an update letter to my friends and family (and also made a blog post out of it). In this letter, I wrote that I wasn’t doing well, wasn’t that happy, that I was broke, uncertain of where I was going, that I felt crappy and found it difficult to leave the house for several days at a time.
I had never written anything like this. I had tended to always be positive in what I wrote. Focusing on the good, hoping to inspire others to great heights. And for the most part, this was fitting, because I tend to be a happy and excited person. But the months of January and February were quite trying for me and I was finding new areas of my self (what some call the shadow side) that I had never really explored in the past.
So I decided to just share it with everyone in an unabashed, unapologetic manner. Feeling sorry for myself, feeling down about life, feeling somewhat hopeless and scared and confused. Sending this e-mail was definitely more difficult than others I have sent in the past, because I realize I want people to think I know what I’m doing, that I have my life together, and that I am successful and cool and someone worth knowing.
This experiment turned out to be an unmitigated success. It definitely left people with the impression that I am depressed, but hey, so what. Here are the 3 reasons I am really glad that I did this in retrospect and why I intend to continue becoming more and more and more and more and more and more open with myself and everyone else, from my closest friends to complete strangers.
#1: You get more comfortable with all aspects of yourself
It’s a really freeing feeling to know that other people know the worst about you. It’s a really freeing feeling to know that no matter how bad you sometimes feel, other people already know you feel that bad. Because you told them once already. So now, you can just feel however you feel and be OK with it, because they’ve seen you at high highs and low lows, and are not surprised when you report any number of feelings to them.
The reason that this is so nice is because it gets you more comfortable with all these different aspects of yourself. It makes me feel as OK telling someone that life sucks as it does telling someone that everything’s great. And this does a wonder for me. It allows me to relax. It allows me to be OK feeling how I feel. It allows me to explore dark areas of myself without getting so scared of them.
I am pretty sure that a big reason people are scared of the dark sides of themselves is because they have presented an image to other people as confident or together or cool or sane or happy or fun to be around. I mean, our society doesn’t exactly say “wana get laid? Just talk about misery.” It’s all about being upbeat and confident and light and fun. So when you are OK that you are not always light or fun or upbeat or confident, you can explore those realms and allow yourself to continue growing.
And all this growth makes you into a deeper person, a more rooted person, more in touch with the reality of the principles of life: birth, preservation, and destruction.
#2: You get to see sides of your friends and family that you weren’t aware of
Now, when I wrote this email, I had no idea what to expect. Many of the people receiving it had only known me as someone who was happy and excited and confident, as mentioned above. But what a god-damn wellspring of support and compassion and understanding I received. People came out of the woodworks with their favorite quotes that help them get through the dark days, with their own coping mechanisms, and with story after story of love and support for me and my journey and what I’m doing.
I was truly bowled over with love and gratitude to see that by sharing my own shadow side, I enable others to touch their own shadow while they read, and to consider the fact that we’ve all got one. It felt to me like much deeper connections were forged with several people and that relationships, both online and face-to-face, will take on new, more open dynamics, because of my new willingness to be more open.
This is a gift that is difficult to overestimate.
#3: You get to see that you’re not as important as you thought you were
Life goes on, moods go up, they come down, people get born, other people die, and all the while, you worry if you said the right thing, if what you said was taken the right way, if you should have done it that way. So when you say the scariest things to people, when you let out all of your bad sides, and the days continue to pass, people continue to come and go out of your life, you realize that people don’t care that much one way or the other. They’re too busy focusing on themselves.
And that feeling of having nothing to hide cuz you’ve got nothing to lose, is a real place of peace. It’s a real giver of perspective in this celebrity-focused, fame-seeking, attention-desiring world I find myself in, which I am a part of as much as anyone else. I figure if I’m gonna try to get attention so much, I should at least give people something worth seeing, something that makes them realize that however they’re feeling is A OK, and that we all go through it, and maybe it’d be nice to all go through it together.
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