Forty-Onederful

Several girl friends told me that when I hit my forties, I would step fully into my power as a woman. I'm still on the early end of the decade, but I have occasional glimpses of what they were talking about.


Some of them said things like, "You'll stop caring about what other people think." Maybe that kind of hard line will appear at some later point, but I do find that as I settle more securely into who I am and who I want to become, I'm placing less emphasis on others' opinions of me. 


It's not exactly that I don't care what you think - for better or worse, often I still do - but not to the same degree, and not to the extent that I allow it to induce the obsessive shape-shifting that it used to. 


The truth is, at this point, I just want to be me. To not only accept my shortcomings and development opportunities, but to get to know them, even make friends with them - to find out what I can learn from them. 


As it turns out, there's a lot of juice and wisdom in the messy stuff - the things that for years got locked in the cellar because they weren't worthy of the sunlight, or of the image I'd constructed (or was trying to construct) for myself. And a lot of that had to do with what I thought others would think of me if they knew the truth about how unremarkable and imperfect I am. 


I thought that if I didn't excel at everything, I would be a failure; if I couldn't somehow convince myself of assured success, I was inclined not to try at all. For the endeavors that I did undertake, I often was so consumed with trying to master them to perfection (whatever THAT means), so focused on the outcome, that I wasn't fully present to the journey, the process, the learning that occurred along the way. Each new venture was a performance opportunity, instead of a learning opportunity. 


I so feared failure (whatever THAT means) that it became the only alternative to "perfection". The expansive middle ground that stretches between these two ends of the spectrum fell away into a gaping black chasm where experience, growth and joy got (and stayed) lost. Of course, I didn't see this at the time. At all. 


But as the cellar got fuller and fuller, and I had to work harder to keep the door bolted, I began to feel perpetually anxious and tired. I worried constantly that the ground beneath my feet would give way to the monument of imperfection that was threatening to thrust its way through the basement ceiling and into the room with me, with you, with us. Which of course, it eventually did, because as a friend once said, "The truth always rises to the surface."


Over time, as I've started sifting through the buried treasures, traumas and trivia that comprise whole other aspects of me and my life, I've been able to admit (accept, even!) that despite all my grandiose aspirations and strivings to the contrary, I am just...ordinary. This acknowledgement ushers in a healthy dose of humility, but it also provides a substantial helping of relief and liberation. 


So I'm in the process of forging a relationship with my ordinary self. 


In redefining what I value in myself, I am less concerned with others' estimation of my value. In releasing myself from the mandate or expectation to be exceptional (or nice or successful or [insert adjective here]), I can be real and present and more fully human. 


"Excelling" is less important today than being honest, living my values, admitting and learning from my mistakes, making tomorrow a better day. Fitting into to someone else's idea of what success looks like is not of much interest to me anymore. Feeling comfortable in my own skin is more my speed, and it is to that I am turning my attention more and more. 


So while I may still care something about what you think of me, I care more about how I feel about myself - all the real, imperfect, still-trying-to-figure-it-out parts of myself. 


And that feels forty-onederful.