When I was younger and playing basketball often my coaches would implement scrimmages in practice, which were practice games intended to be played at a lower intensity to a real game. Sometimes, to differentiate between the two teams, we would play in “shirts and skins”, whereby the “shirts” team kept their shirts on and the “skins” team played shirtless. Whenever we played shirts and skins, I would pray silently under my breath that I would get picked on the shirts team. Back then it was a self-image thing, but you could say I wasn’t comfortable in my own skin.
In terms of self-improvement, comfort in one’s own skin rarely seems the goal. Often, we talk about stretch-goals and getting out of your comfort zone, rather than progressing inwards. We could say the same about work, or about study, or about relationships, or about any number of things we as humans engage in: engage in a process to deliver the desired outcome, with the hope of forward progress.
There’s a step before improvement and development, a necessary one: acceptance. Why? Because getting out of your comfort zone can be the easy way out. If you’re not at home with yourself, then stepping out of your comfort zone can be used as an escape or as a mask. As an escape, because you can’t sit with yourself and who you are. Or, as a mask to portray a confidence and acceptance that you don’t actually own.
Now, acceptance can be a tricky word because it has layers of intensity. There’s a difference between accepting chocolate and accepting the wholeness of who you are, right? Further, to what extent does acceptance stretch to: is it the mere acknowledgement of who you are or the full embrace of who you are? And if you accept who you are, do you then have to do anything at all to grow or develop, or does acceptance mean you must stay the same?
When applied to self, acceptance is a tricky concept because we can encounter things that we don’t like and naturally, we want to be better. On a personal level, there’s a basic recognition that a best self is even possible and furthermore, desirable. Our best self will attract the best grades, the best job, the most fruitful relationships, the best possible outcomes for ourselves. Perhaps maybe we’ve had the experience of letting someone down, of not being enough; in which case the desire to be better could additionally stem from an altruistic sense, i.e. to be better for others in the realisation that who you are really does impact on the lives of those around us.
All of this to say that I’m still not comfortable in my own skin.
It isn’t that I don’t like myself. Rather, that the level of acceptance I carried for myself was shallow. My self-acceptance was dependent on things or roles or people to provide validation and definition to who and how I am. For the last five years (at least), I maintained a very defined role at work, I was engulfed in studying and I leaned heavily on a small circle of friends. I allowed things from my past to continue to influence my present. Ironically, my concept of self was based very little on my actual self, or at least my present self.
I made it my New Year’s resolution to become comfortable in my own skin. Our time overseas provides the perfect conditions: having left work, finished studying, moved away from defining (and toxic) relationships, who I am is now allowed to be a fruit of my own ability to accept myself.
Part of that is stretching myself and getting out of my comfort zone. But the other part of it is exploring and accepting the good I find within my comfort zone. For example, I’ve always blogged but now I’m allowing myself to explore other parts of my creativity through photo and video editing and maintaining our website. The video editing, in particular, is something I would never have shown publicly, not because it’s outside of my comfort zone but because I couldn’t accept my own creativity. I still experience a bit of imposter syndrome every time one of our videos goes live, because I feel like I have no business editing videos. Yet, ultimately, I feel fuller in the self-expression editing allows me.
Again, it’s not that I don’t like myself, I do. I just want to lean more on a validation that comes from self-certainty, than from validation sought from outside myself. But honestly, some days I don’t even know what it looks like or means to become more comfortable in my own skin. The idea feels enigmatic or ethereal. Other days, it is my biggest challenge to own and live fully in who I am. Most of the time I wonder how I let so many things and relationships define who I am and that I’m only now doing something about it at 27. That seems absurd to me and I kick myself for it.
I guess where I’m trying to get to be is a place where I can return home and not be desperate to engulf myself in work to feed my need for role and definition. I want to be able to engage in relationships without past relationships limiting how I engage. And I want to stop limiting my own giftedness because of imposter syndrome or apprehension of what others may (or may not) think. The journey for me then is about allowing myself to disconnect enough from my fears and anxieties so that I can find enough breathing room to dare to believe more in my own potential.
The scary thing is that I could have cruised along through life and not changed my mindset at all. We all could fall to this trap because of the way our society is built around process and output. There isn’t a social requirement to be able to sit with yourself and be at peace. Yet, I do believe there is a spiritual requirement, a need in each of our souls, to ask ourselves whether we’re really at home with who we are and whether we actually are comfortable in our own skin.
It’s not about a complete remodel. Rather, what are those things that you don’t dare do or say due to fears or anxieties? Who do you not let yourself become? And why? How can you speak into the way you manage your time and energy, into your relationships and into your own sense of self to stretch not just out of yourself but also more deeply into who you are and can be.
Comfort in your own skin isn’t just a warm feeling. It’s a necessity if you wish to be the version of you who is most fulfilled, accomplished and influential. It’s not a selfish pleasure, it is the most important thing you can pursue to best serve your loved ones, those around you and your community. When you allow imposter syndrome to overtake your own sense of self, then you become an imposter within yourself – and that doesn’t serve anyone.
