I think as kids, when we experience the world for the first time, we experiment with expressing what that’s like for us through our natural filters.
Maybe we naturally express our experience through movement, or maybe we like to organize our experiences into neat rows. Maybe we like to create projects to express our experience, or tell stories or sing or make music. Or maybe we like to analyze or paint or photograph. Or maybe we’re very sensitive and prone to great sadness, or we love to laugh. Or maybe we find great relief through flapping our wings like a bird, or maybe we like to help others.
The thing is, that all of these filters are our natural ways of sharing our experiences right now. And if we’re given space to express ourselves in these natural ways, we get to continue on our paths of self-expression and grow and develop naturally.
But if we grow up in environments where there isn’t space for us to express our experiences naturally, and if we have someone, or many people in our lives that say, “No. Do not share yourself like this. Ever again. Share yourself like this instead, like we do,” and they hand us their ways of being in the world that are more ‘appropriate,’ a chasm can get created. A chasm between our own natural experience of the world and how we’re allowed to express our experience of being the world.
I think learning skills like manners are important, and learning to read faces and read spaces so that we can integrate our self expression into the world of others’ self expression is important and sometimes necessary for our own safety, but not at the expense of our own natural expression in the rest of our environments.
Because if we doubt that the natural expression of our own experiences are welcome, we may cope destructively with the anxiety that comes from knowing we have to squash ourselves to be allowed in the world.
If we are neglected or criticized for example, we may filter our expression through our having been criticized or neglected. We may get cautious and inauthentically express our experiences just to avoid being criticized or neglected, or we may avoid creating healthy boundaries just in order to get the reward of being accepted.
And this comes at a high price.
After living for some time through the masks we’ve been forced to wear, we may discover that we have attracted situations and people that are not a match for who we experience ourselves to be, but only a match for who we’ve pretended to be. And bc of this, we may feel exhausted, unknown and strange. Or maybe we walk around feeling rigid about other people’s self expression, bc if we can’t be free, well then, neither should they.
Or maybe we self-harm or turn to substances, or anything that offers a release from these masks that aren’t ours so we can give ourselves a fucking break.
Or maybe the chasm between the person within us and the person we’re allowed to be gets so distinct, it snaps in half in the form of dissociation.
Whatever the case, I believe that no matter how long we’ve felt stuck inside ourselves, our natural expression still exists within us. And I believe we can still access this authentic part of ourselves.
And once we realize that who we are inside ourselves is a gift worth giving, I believe we can heal that great chasm—by stepping past all those supposed-to-be’s, and once again being true to expressing our natural experience of being in this world.
To me, there’s enough space for everyone to share their natural experience of being in the world. And we can make this space possible for ourselves and each other by allowing people to share themselves naturally instead of judging and redirecting them. We can give people the space to show up and be celebrated for who they are, instead of who they aren’t.
-JLK
