My 'ideal' self versus my 'true' self, and the truth in-between.

This is the third in a series of posts exploring a conversation between spirituality and living out some form of sustainable life in our modern world. To start from the beginning, click here.

When I was a child I was particularly short (unlike the towering height I have reached now of course) and when I was about 4 years old I had picked up a little rhyme from pre-school:

“I’m the King of the castle, and you’re the dirty rascal” 

Not a particularly clever rhyme but for some reason it appealed greatly to my tiny ginger self. Perhaps it was because I knew that I wasn’t the king of any castle, nor anything close to it. And so the rhyme became very popular with me; so popular that I began chanting it at people all too frequently, much to my parents’ frustration.

In the end they had to ban me from chanting it at visitors when they would come to our house. Shortly after this ban was implemented, a friend of the family called Ernie came to visit and I simply could not help myself. As he sat cross-legged on the floor in our lounge I danced around him with glee, chanting the rhyme over and over. Unfortunately this did not escape the attention of my parents who whisked me away to my room for a brief encounter with Winnie the Whale. (Winnie was a wooden whale, engraved with scriptures, designed specifically for smacking children and sold in every good New Zealand Christian bookstore in the 1980s). 

It is always intriguing to me to reflect on the ways we present ourselves to others. Many of us have a deep desire to be a certain kind of person, an ideal of the person we want to be; whether it be outgoing, hardworking, funny, creative, capable, successful and so on. But for all of us (unless you happen to be the exception) there is at least some gap between the person we are and the person we wish to be. Our ideal version of ourselves, and the real version that we actually have to live with.

I was 3 feet tall and trying to be the king of a castle. But I wasn’t.

As we grow up, one way of coping with this difference is to present a version of ourselves to others that is as close as possible to the person we want to be, rather than the person we know (or at least, suspect) that we really are. Over time we become experts at this, presenting our more ideal self to people. Social media and online personas have given us innovative ways to do this, but they’re simply new versions of a game we’ve always been playing.

Not only are we constructing this in order to appeal to others, we are doing it to meet our own expectations. To feel like we’re the kind of person we aspire to be, the kind of person we think others want us to be, and perhaps in a religious sense, to be the kind of person that we think God wants us to be. 

And of course if we are honest, there are parts of ourselves that we hide because we wish we didn’t have them. There are pieces of ourselves that we don’t want to accept because to accept them would be to accept failure or weakness. And who really wants to own up to that? 

So – why does it matter? Is it really “good news” to have to own up to who we really are?

Well, maybe it is.

Because a lot of us are subtly anxious about the gap between our ideal selves and who we are underneath. Maybe we’re worried that our flaws and failings will be discovered at any moment. Nervous that someone is going to see through our façade. I have known many people over the years who are constantly worried that their boss at work is suddenly going to see through them and realise that they’re not all their CV made them out to be. And it also happens in our relationships. For some of us our fear of intimacy is related to the desire to hide our real selves from others - and sometimes for really understandable reasons!

But when we live our lives in the constant and desperate attempt to live up to, or at least portray, the ideal version of ourselves - the self we want to be, hope to be, wish we could be - we exhaust ourselves along the way. We can live large portions of our life playing out roles that we think others expect from us. And this kind of unsustainable life can manifest itself in all sorts of ways. Perhaps we quit our job, a relationship or a friendship, before somebody begins to truly see us; perhaps we develop anxiety and constant agitation that we’re not who we wish we were; perhaps we find ourselves rolling over the top of others in our attempt to succeed, to make it, to dominate or to be approved of. Or perhaps we just find ourselves running out of steam. 

Ironically, for those people who are in the church this can be even more of a challenge. Although one would hope that the Christian invitation is to put down the masks and stop pretending, religious life can become pressure to do exactly the opposite. To put on more masks so that we would not be found out for who we really are. Sometimes this pressure comes in the form of a call toward holiness, where “holiness” is defined as a series of correct thoughts, behaviours and practices. The standards shift and change over time, but the same driving ethos is present. 

But the consequence of this desire for holiness can often be pretence and paranoia. Living a life that appears to live up to some kind of standard, and the constant worry that people will see through you for you who really are. The irony here is that the language of holiness itself is subverted in the Jesus story, and is shown to have much less to do with external purity markers, and much more to do with the way we treat one another, the way we accept one another, and the way that we love. That is the kind of holiness that Jesus seems interested in.

But loving one another means actually knowing one another. And to love and know one another means accepting ourselves too. It is difficult to love others fully when we’re struggling so profoundly to accept the broken parts of ourselves. Of course it’s not as easy as saying, “oh right, thanks, I’m going to be authentic now. Hey everyone - do you know about all my issues?” It is much more complex than that, it’s a much longer process than that, and it’s only really outworked in relationships with others over time.

And funnily enough, the more people you talk with, the more people you realise live in this space too. Those people that you think have it all together, the people whose social media life looks like something you want, the people who lead like you want to lead, the people who have the success, fame and confidence that you wish you had, the people who post blogs, record podcasts and write books giving insight and advice about spirituality and faith and being in the shift; all of these people are wrestling with the same kind of fundamental concerns. Even the gurus, the contemplatives, the enlightened ones, the ones who have discovered their ‘true selves’ and seem to simply inhabit the present moment; they’re all still wrestling with a sense of identity and a sense of self. This is not a ‘problem’ that can be ‘solved’, now matter how compelling the solution sounds.

So the challenge and the possibility is to make peace with this fact. I am not who I want to be, but neither am I that which I fear. My identity is found constantly moving in between – being worked out, being negotiated over time, being discovered and rediscovered, formed and reformed. And the potency of spirituality is that this dynamic self is anchored in a deep sense of connectedness to something larger, something that can ground me in the deeply rooted soil of compassion. And if I start here, with a sense of acceptance, and a recognition that my “self” is always on the move, then I can invite courage into my day and say – hello: this is me, here I am, let’s give it a go.