Acceptable
You don’t fit in Vanessa and you never will. Nothing you try will make you fit in.
I have an ongoing battle with feeling accepted and trying not to suppress who I am in order to be what I perceive to be acceptable to others. There’s a sound track, it’s in my head and it taunts me wanting to know what makes me think I should be right here, right now, with the people I am with. I think if anyone peered into my journal and saw the extent of the struggle I have had and still have with feeling accepted they would be worried!
This summer I spent a week at a Christian young adult’s festival, we had gone out as a team of people from church and we were running a cafe. I was responsible for coordinating the cafe – it should have been so much fun but it became the week in the year I most battled with a crushing sense of inadequacy and failure as a person. It was a week of being re-confronted with the extent of the brokenness in my life, the parts of me I was suppressing in order to be acceptable. The way I behaved around guys I liked –namely trying to be someone I was not because being me was just not good enough. It was crushing, it was eye opening, and it was humbling. That week had far reaching consequences for many decisions I made in the months that followed and it still is a key point in my journey I had almost convinced myself that I was over those issues. I don’t think so somehow.
Somehow though in the midst of all the tears and revelations of that week I met Jesus again. He said to me I know it all and you are acceptable to me .You can’t hide yourself from me; I see you as you are. I see you as you are. He gave me permission once more to just be me – loud, dramatic, clumsy, getting it wrong, vulnerable me. Not the super strong woman I so often try to portray myself as.
He sees us as we are and he loves us as we are. He loves us as we are. No matter how much I think about that I am still amazed – he loves ME as I am. He loves YOU as you are. I want to live my life in the knowledge of that acceptance; I want my life and my choices to be dictated by the tangible experience of the acceptance and love that God has for me. I want to see myself as HE sees me not the way that other people do or even as I see myself. But wanting and actually living it out are 2 completely different things.
For me the process of walking out being myself is just to do that – to consciously make the effort to be myself and to suppress parts of my personality. It means having conversations with God about how I feel. It means making sure that the people around me know how I am doing with that battle, talking to people about how I feel is the thing I struggle with the most as it is then that I feel most exposed and more like a failure. But knowing that there is the area I most struggle with means that the area I need to choose to work the hardest on. Knowing it’s ok to fail and get it wrong because at the end of the day – I am still acceptable as I am.