Searching for Biggest Weakness

How often do you look at yourself and honestly evaluate the most significant weakness? The honesty and emotions that are raised by this sort of inquiry are not dismissed lightly. I recently searched my life to identify my biggest weakness.

There are probably many people who know me would think of, and some who don’t know me could come up with a lot more.  I never claimed to be perfect, but when it comes down to my absolute biggest weakness, it is the fact that I have cared way too much about what other people thought about me. 

Always Been the Case

Some of my earliest memories are of being shy and worrying about what other kids thought about my clothes and the things that I was doing.  Even though I was lucky enough to attend a school with supportive kids who never unearthed my fear, I still carried it deep inside.  As I grew up, this fear made its presence known every day.  I was incredibly self-conscious in high school (I know, who isn’t), but to the point where I was looking to fit in, ANYWHERE!  I was an athlete, so most of my friends came from the teams I was a part of.  They were great people, and I believe today would have liked me anyway, but then I felt like I had to maintain an image. Protection over who I was so that I could never be criticized or, in a more profound sense, rejected.

This continued throughout my adult life, the pattern of only allowing people in my life a few glimpses of who I was and keeping the rest locked away, for only me.  Yes, I was friendly, and I got along just fine, but nobody, and I means nobody, ever really saw the real me.  I was too worried I was not good enough. This is the source of my programming, throughout life, and something I have had to notice and overcome.

Unmasked

Finally, after years of living what should have been an enjoyable life, I reached two conclusions that were irrefutable and hard to avoid.  I didn’t like my job, and I didn’t like the person I was very much either.  That realization made me question a few things.

Why did I not like myself?  This perplexed me, and as I thought about it, it wasn’t me I didn’t like but the life I was living.  I was very self-centered and selfish. Everything I did was for me and me alone. There was no actual service, no real giving, no real opportunity to be me because I was too worried about what people thought about me. I was far from the person I was, and life provided little absolute joy without the expression of my true self.

My job? I should have loved it, I was teaching school, but I started to dislike all of the rules and petty inconveniences of that particular profession.  It is like trying to live your life in a fishbowl. For me, I was constantly on my guard.  I could never just be myself.  People seemed to criticize everything, and I tried to stay under the radar and out of the way. Eventually, that became impossible. I was not born to live under the radar, and our true self will find a way to come out if we don’t look to express it.

So Who Am I?

Can anyone answer this?  It is often easier to define who you are not.  You are not your job.  You are not what people think of you.  You are not what you feel about yourself.  You are not your relationships: father, mother, sister, brother, friend.  So I am none of those things, and the labels don’t matter.

I am a person who cares about others and wants everyone to recognize the unique talents they have within them and use them to enhance their own lives and the lives of those they come in contact with. That includes me.

So Now What?

Now I am exposed, and that is who I am.  I will try to live up to who I am as best I can so that I can hold my head up and face myself.  Because in the end, it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks of you. It matters what you feel about yourself.  Everybody else will have to make that judgment for themselves.  My advice to you and me is:

– Don’t hide who you are because it is who you were made to be, and nobody else can do the job anyway.

–Don’t care what anyone thinks about you because their criticisms only come from jealousy, envy, or fear.  Love them because they are where you used to be.

–Follow your passion into whatever realm it leads you. Whatever you are drawn to that makes you feel whole, go there, do that thing!

Consider my biggest weakness, exposed, dissected, and dismissed. To all those who judge:  “There are many things that people do happily that I can’t imagine why they would do it… But I have to say that even though I am critical or judgmental of society at large, I’m not critical of people individually. We are who we are. “
Ian MacKaye

It is funny in an odd way how fear determined so many of my actions when if we are totally honest about ourselves and our motives, everybody is terrified of something most of the time, and it determines most of our actions.