I often find myself feeling all alone in the mistakes I make, in what I perceive as my imperfections and flaws, in my countless worries, in my inefficiencies, in the dreams that seem to take too long to accomplish, in my failings, in my fears of mortality.
I’m not a betting man, but if I were to interview a million people, I’d bet 999,999 would express the same sentiment if they were being completely honest with me. And the other one probably just misunderstood the question . . . after all, I do speak with an exceedingly unique accent.
The two keywords in the last paragraph are ‘COMPLETELY’, ‘HONEST’.
Being honest about our human-ness can sometimes feel like it takes the combined courage of Hercules, Wonder Woman, and Yoda, multiplied by Princess Leia, plus Chewbacca squared to the third power.
Not content with merely hiding my general human happenings, for much of my life I also tried to conceal the fact that I have a speech impediment, from myself and everybody else. And in case you were wondering, trying to conceal a speech impediment, is like a toddler covering his eyes and imagining a room full of people can’t see him.
I did my absolute best to conceal my voice so that I could generally pretend…..
That I was perfect….
Ain’t that a laugh?! That was an even harder gig than disguising the speech impediment!
Ironically enough, during this time period, I also prided myself on telling the truth. I wasn’t out and out lying to people, after all . . . it wasn’t like they were approaching me everyday and asking if I had a speech impediment and I was responding “NO!”
Everyone could hear full well that I had a speech impediment.
I was the one being dishonest with myself.
You know what I discovered from endeavoring to hide the sound of my voice and much of the rest of my humanity?
I discovered that the seemingly endless work to cover up the real me was miserably lonely.
Life feels infinitely better now that I share much more of who I am.
And guess what? People are more relaxed around me because they know the real me.
You are not alone in being human. We are all on this ride together.
Each day, I endeavor to find the courage to share who I truly am. Somedays I’m better at it than others.
May you find the courage to share your humanness with the world. Today and every day.
Countless people are hungry for us to be ourselves because when we are ourselves, they feel more freedom to be themselves.
It’s an honor to be on this very human, imperfect best journey of with you.
Lots of love you amazing human, you!
Jason’s book, Awkwardly Awesome: Embracing My Imperfect Best, is NOW on Amazon in both Kindle and Paperback formats!
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