Are You Measuring Up?

“Haley, I don’t think you see yourself very clearly,” a friend said to me.

I had just uttered a self-evaluation of my physical appearance. It wasn’t a particularly encouraging or positive utterance. This wasn’t the first time she told me she didn’t think I saw myself accurately.

She is the type of friend who will tell me when I am wrong but has always encouraged me in who I am.

This time her observation stuck with me.

Did I see myself clearly?

And if not, why?

I began to think back on times that I have struggled with who I am.

Whether it was something I was doing or the way I appeared. I have often felt negative about myself and been hard on myself for feeling like I should be more than I am.

At times, it felt so obvious that I was falling short of “the standard”.

What standard, you ask? I don’t even know. The unspoken standard of who I should be. The one that I have pressured on myself and the one that I have felt pressured by the world.

Why is it so hard to feel content with who we are and the choices we make?

Life is filled with a lot of intricate experiences that complicate our perception of who we are. We learn from a young age who we are “supposed” to be and the life we “should” live. We spend much of our early years learning rules and expectations to function in society. (Some of us embrace these expectations more than others.) We also learn quickly that if we perform “well” we get more praise and acceptance than when we fail.

We are taught a standard for social acceptance and these guidelines are easy to become our standard for self-acceptance.

It is easy to feel that when others accept us that means we are “good”, but when people disapprove of us than we are “bad”. Sadly, this is a very unreliable measuring tool of our value because everyone has such varying perceptions.

It is quite easy to lose ourselves while we try to meet everyone’s expectations.

It seems clear to me that most of us have inaccurate views of ourselves. We are often our own worst critic and spend too much time thinking about our failures. We hold on to the worst things that people have said to us and forget to remember the best.

For years, I have been on a journey of learning to live in grace for myself and release the expectations of how I thought everything would turn out… including myself.

I am learning how to look at my flaws and say, “Yep, that is not the most attractive feature I have, but that’s alright.”

I am not looking to create a mindset that says I am perfect.

I am looking to create a mindset that knows I am not perfect, but I am perfectly ok with it.

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