Look in the Mirror and Clearly See

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Have you ever felt discontent with who you are?

Several years ago, I found myself frustrated with my life. Don’t get me wrong, my circumstances were great. I had a wonderful family, great friends, I was a new mom, I was blessed with a job that I enjoyed and I was in a flourishing marriage, yet I felt disappointed with myself.

I wanted to find a way to live content.

I wanted to learn to be ok with who I was.

I wanted to learn how to love me.

I set off on a journey to discover and learn to appreciate who I am. Now, after several years, I have a suggestion for anyone who is longing to become more secure in who you are:

Look in the mirror,

see yourself

and own what you see.

This is harder than it sounds. As I look back, I realize that I have spent a lot of time either running from the mirror or lying about what I saw. Why would I do this? I was filled with pride and fear. Pride kept me blind to the truth of my brokenness and fear kept me ashamed of my imperfections.

It can be so easy to get caught up in lying to ourselves about who we are, but in order to be completely free we must see it all, the good, the bad and the ugly. Only after we acknowledge that we have flaws can we begin to attend to them. I didn’t even realize that I had been hiding or denying complete parts of myself.

If we want to truly begin transforming our lives, we must stop thinking that it is unacceptable to have problems, insecurities and brokenness. It is not bad to have “issues”, it is human. The sad thing is that we are all walking around trying to be “perfect”, when in reality, we all have major shit we are working through.

Embrace the real you.

Embrace the truth of who you are, in all its beauty and in all of its ugliness. Embrace that you are a person filled with many aspects: wonderful things, embarrassing things, strengths, weaknesses and brokenness. Embrace your current self, embrace who you have been and embrace who you will be.

I was struggling with being secure because I wasn’t acknowledging who I was. My instincts told me that if I wasn’t perfect then I would lose my value; instead, I found the opposite to be true. Only in being genuine and embracing who I truly am, have I been able to find security.

Once we learn how to accept who we are, flaws and all, we learn something extremely powerful, to love without the premise of perfection.  I have learned the life changing ability to love something that is a work in progress, myself. Even better, I no longer expect others to be perfect. I have thrown away the bar of “performance & expectations” in which I used to measure people’s value. I have finally tapped into the truth that value is not in having a perfect reflection, but being a person, which is of great value.

Don’t let the fear of imperfections keep you from growing. Own your brokenness and own your beauty, they are both very present within you and that is more than ok, that is human. This life just goes by too fast for not knowing yourself.

Embrace right where you are today, give yourself grace to be broken and then become determined to begin the journey to healing.