Become As You Are

On refusing the norm and being true to who we really are

Image: Sinéad O’Connor performing in 1988

During the roller coaster ride that was my twenties, I became so good at masquerading behind the perfect disguise of a fancy job that I took it for who I was. It was only later, in the wilderness years of my thirties, when the mirage of the person I’d so very carefully constructed had dissolved, that I began the painful process of sifting through the tattered remains of all my old hats and masks and wigs, in recovery of who I really was underneath.

What I learnt out among the wild beasts and howling winds of this particular desert was that for as long as I remained caught up on a wheel of perfectionism and people pleasing, while simultaneously craving to be different, better than, superior, I was travelling further and further away from my authentic self at the expense of my health and creativity and pretty much everything else.

Having crossed the threshold into my fifties, I’m still learning, still on this same journey of becoming. What strikes me now is that, of the many complex reasons why I ended up in the wilderness, one of them was that I had not properly understood the rules of the game. Despite my best efforts to dress up and play along, at some fundamental level I had failed to fit in. Finding myself on the outside of the party, I felt intense humiliation and shame.

In ‘The Myth of Normal’, the Canadian physician and trauma expert Gabor Maté explains we have two basic requirements for survival; attachment and authenticity. Attachment comes from our need to belong, which can be traced all the way back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, where rejection by the group meant almost certain death in the wild. The need for authenticity, likewise, is connected to our basic survival instincts and can be understood in physiological terms as the agency to act on our gut feelings - and to run for the hills if we sense danger.

The trouble begins when our attachment to belonging comes at the expense of our need for authenticity. Maté goes as far as to say that the very traits which cause us to lose connection with our authenticity - such as taking responsibility for the emotions of others and rigidly identifying with our job titles, how much we earn, what groups we do or don’t belong to and so on - are not only normalised by society but re-framed as virtues. These, he argues, are the myths that so many of us are living by.

“It’s sobering to realise,” he says, “That many of the personality traits we have to come to believe are us, and, perhaps even take pride in, actually bear the scars of where we lost connection to ourselves, way back when.”

In my case, as is common for so many, I learned how to disguise myself way back in childhood. If I was a driven and highly ambitious twenty-something, the person I most wanted to prove myself to, even as I was desperate to escape her, was my mother and the values she espoused. The author Jeanette Winterson captures the tragedy of this irony well in the words of her dysregulated (adopted) mother; “why be happy when you could be normal?” – also the title of her 2011 memoir.

Maté and Winterson’s concerns about the myth of normal, meanwhile, echo those of Carl Jung, who viewed the central crisis at the heart of modernity as this same loss of connection with who we really are. While certain shared values and agreed standards of behaviour are, of course, needed to support the functioning of societies, the truth is that all too often they are leveraged in support of unequal power structures and ideological agendas that are necessarily exclusive. Under these terms, difference, individuality and diversity become a form of heresy and the scalps of those who choose to betray the norms (of necro-capitalism, of the nation state, of hard-line group think) over betraying themselves are all too frequently paraded as trophies, as the so-called wars on terror and woke so frighteningly illustrate. (Maté found that some medics interviewed in his book asked for anonymity to protect their careers, even though their views are backed up by rigorous research).

So, how do we navigate the conflict between our need for attachment, on the one hand, and our need for authenticity, on the other? What’s the difference between healthy compromise and harmful conformity? What does it mean to be more ourselves and therefore, more individual, less in disguise?

The root of the word individual simply means to be ‘un-divided’. In the Jungian sense, to become more individual is not to become more self-absorbed, more navel gazing, more selfish, more hyper-individualistic. The goal of what Carl Jung terms the individuation process, it is to become more attuned to our intuition, imagination, creativity and to what makes us unique - our imperfections as well as our gifts - in order to better discern how we might contribute to the collective for the greater good.  

Two brilliant memoirs I’ve recently enjoyed that candidly explore the risky act of rejecting the myth of normal are Sinéad O’Connor’s ‘Rememberings’ and ‘Down The Drain’ by the Italian-born New York artist, actress, style icon and closest thing to a modern day Warholian superstar, Julia Fox.

In ‘Rememberings’, O’Connor talks of how, inspired by her hero David Bowie, she preternaturally knew that if she was to honour her gift of singing, then she would do so in her own thick working class Dublin accent. She would shave off her hair when told to be more feminine, have a baby when told to have an abortion and write of the esoteric African myths and spiritual practices she identified with, whether she would sell records or not. Finally, O’Connor writes of how she would speak truth to power – tearing up a photograph of the Pope on Saturday Night Live in protest at child abuse by the Catholic Church, even though she would earn the label ‘She Devil’ and worse.

In ‘Down The Drain’, Fox tells of how she overcame a catastrophic sequence of heroin addiction, near-death experiences and toxic relationships, alongside her own, at times, crippling lack of self-worth. She dryly writes of how she avenged the myth of the norm, breaking multiple taboos – among them squeezing her large curves into skin-tight latex and kick-starting a phenomenon - thus;

“I’m an artist in the role of a lifetime, playing me… I’m re-claiming my body and I’m rejecting the notion that I exist only to be visually pleasing… Everywhere I turn (in New York) I see girls dressed like me. It’s a far cry from the days I was bullied and called weirdo, freakazoid, white trash, prostitute or, my favourite, weird white girl with the fat ass. I was ridiculed for being different and doing whatever I had to do to survive but now… everyone is wearing latex.”

To embrace our unique individuality, then, is to heal the split between our constructed self-concepts and the authentic self who exists underneath. Which means (and this is the scary part, at least for me) learning to become comfortable with being disliked, misunderstood and, perhaps at times, with being outright rejected.

That’s the risk. The reason it’s easier to play it safe and conform to the so-called norm. Until the harm is done and then… back to square one.

Which is why it increasingly seems to me that it’s through becoming more individual that we get free. And in a time of climate catastrophe, global turmoil and multiple wars, the greater the imperative to seize the freedom we have in honour, not only of our own healing, but all those who have had their freedom taken away.

Creative Experiments

1.     Over the last year, what myths of normal have you found yourself caught up in & how did they affect you? If your body could talk, what would it tell you?

2.     Choose one or more of these myths and re-write them as a myth of abnormal, in which you are free to express your authentic self. Make this world as real or surreal as you feel. What risks are involved? What choices do you make? What impact do they have on yourself and others? You may find it helps to write yourself as fictional character.

3.     Who – living or dead, fictional or real - personifies authentic individuality to you? Write a letter to them saying what it is that you admire about them. How might they reply?

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