Self Betrayal is not a healthy path to belonging

​Brene Brown says, "true belonging doesn't require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are."

Belonging. It's a primal need. We can't survive, at least in any healthy way, without feeling like we belong.

This is especially true of the felt sense that we belong to others.

The thing is, the true value of belonging, the reason it is such a need in our lives, is belonging is where we should be able to feel most at peace with who we are. Nothing makes us feel more at peace than sitting with people who reflect, I see you; I know who you are, and I am so grateful you are here with me.

I am grateful not in spite of who you are, but because of who you are.

Sadly, many people don't feel that in the relationships they want to feel most seen and known and accepted in, so instead of feeling at peace with who they are, they go about changing who they are. Changing to comply with the model of themselves they perceive will be better accepted.

And instead of living in peace, they live in constant pressure to be someone they are not.

And this world, it seems committed to aide us in our pursuit of fitting in more than it wants to nurture our level of self-acceptance.

Go through online photos of people. Chances are you are looking at layers of filters and AI generated compositions of how good one theoretically COULD look, all to satisfy the folks who theoretically don't believe the way they look is acceptable.

Even the stories we tell, the groups we join, the causes we get behind, many times they aren't OUR stories. They are the stories of people jumping into a current that will sweep them along with it, never tempted to spit them back onto the shore, as long as they go with the current.

There is a comfort in that, knowing I will never be spit back to the shore. Often times a comfort worth being a current person and not an authentic person.

I write this with some ownership. Ownership of the truth that much of my life I have struggled to find this felt sense of belonging. And most of my life I have produced and lived out characters that DID find a form of belonging, but almost always at the expense of NEVER finding myself.

That is changing.

You can wake up one day and realize that the true pressure of trying to live up to being someone you are not really isn't pressure at all. It's betrayal. It's waking up and facing another day of you betraying you.

There really is no belonging to others until you can crawl into bed with, and wake up with, a self you feel like you belong to. How do you find peace within the acceptance of others when you haven't ever found peace within the acceptance of yourself?

There are parts of ourselves we have a hard time accepting. Some of those parts we have to be brave enough to change, others of those parts we have to be brave enough to say this is who I am, and if you can't accept that I'll walk to the shore, you don't need to spit me there.

I suppose I've been doing a bit of work in both of those categories the last several years.

There is a formula at work in my life. The more I've worked to be true to who I am, the more I have found myself in circles with people who accept who I am.

The more I've worked to be true to who I am, the more I've come to experience a felt sense of belonging.

Brene Brown says, "in the absence of love and belonging, there is always suffering."

Thankfully, more and more, I do feel an absence of suffering.

Me.

The real me.

More and more, the real me.

An absence of suffering.