Embracing Your “Ordinaries” Is How You Become Extraordinary
I wonder what’s wrong with ordinary?
I believe it never makes someone a nobody
Why do we even always chase to be somebody?
Only to become empty.
I remember crafting this poem out of the realization that I’m trying to write like someone else, be someone else. I plan to submit it to a publication in the hope to be published, and the great irony is, I didn’t follow through because I thought there’s nothing special with the piece. Editors would probably leave a note to notify me they could not publish it, and so it just sits here in my list of unpublished ones.
For so long I’ve always been fighting an internal war with myself. How I should speak, move, think, dress, who should I be friends, what should I pursue and believe and, on it goes. It only comes so far until I realize how tired, drained, and lost I am.
That in the process of building on who I think I should be, I lost the essence of who I am.
There’s never been such a time like now when our life is an open book that is for everyone’s consumption and judgments. When our sense of worth has been dependent on the number of friends, likes, and claps, the more quantifiable, the better. Everyone just looks happy, successful, and special. Unconsciously we are all now vying for the spotlight to make sure we are seen. To prove not only to others but to bring home evidence to ourselves that we are worthy.
In one of Brene Brown’s book titled Daring Greatly How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms how the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, she called this dilemma “scarcity or the never enough problem”. Which stems and circle back with how we’ve been conditioned to believe the perfection that the media fed us is the way to be happy and successful. We’ve come to stick to the idea that love, worthiness are things we need to earn instead of something that is inherently within us.
You’ve mistake that being thin enough pretty enough would give the acceptance that you desire. When at the end of the day the only acceptance that you need is yours.
You’ve dutifully taken the misguided notion that a certain level of feat comes from only a handpicked of a profession that you ought to pursue to be “successful”.
It’s mistaking being indifferent and aloof as a cool way of handling your relationships. And its flip side — of being always available and people-pleasing as kindness.
The truth is, as long as you’re playing a certain role to appease people or control how they will see you, you will always fight a losing battle.
And what is the simple yet terrifying solution to this?
Honesty. That beautiful, beautiful thing.
Its finally admitting to yourself that you are not perfect and accepting that you ought not to be. That what you really need is just to be better than who you are yesterday, every day.
It is deciding to walk away from the artificial spotlight and honoring the light inside of you.
It’s dissolving the mirage that you’ve created in trying to control how people should perceive you. It’s laying down your defenses and to finally show up just as you are.
It’s stripping all the expectations you’ve clothed yourself for so long until what’s left is who you are before the world convinced you otherwise.
And watch.
Watch how you will finally realize that the change you have been running after all this time can only start when you finally embrace who you are.
Watch how breathing is so easy now, how everything just flows, like what it should have been all along.
Watch how every fiber of your being comes alive, how your soul expands, and how your heart beats wildly in your ribcage.
Watch how you will finally stop running because now, you know you don’t have to be anywhere else.
For finally you are home.
