To Be With Oneself
Joan Baez once observed that, “the easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.” I believe that is an experience that is commonly shared…but why is that?
Throughout our lives we are constantly striving to feel loved and connected to others. As children, we are dependent on our caregivers to provide the safety and security needed for our development. As teens, we begin to search for how we are connected to our peer group and, as adults, we attempt to build a life around establishing and maintaining relationships with those we love and that make us happy.
During this journey, there are moments when we become acutely aware of the fragility of each of these relationships, leading us to be consumed, at times, with the fear of being alone. In spite of living in a culture that promotes the values of autonomy and individualism, the fact is, we are all social creatures. We yearn to experience deep, intimate connections with others, while understanding that these relationships could end at any moment. This awareness becomes the driving force that leads many of us to focus on attending to the needs of others, at the expense of our own needs. In this view, one would believe that if we can please those around us and do things to keep others happy, then the relationship will become stronger and permanent.
To be effective at this, we would need to change our colors depending on who we are with…becoming a bit of a “social chameleon.” When we are with one group of friends, we may act one way, when we are with another group, we may behave differently. However, this way of being in the world leads us to define ourselves by those around us. In other words, we give others the power to shape who we are.
I believe that there is a sense of comfort in this for some of us. Ultimately, it affords us the opportunity to avoid looking inward and establishing a genuine relationship with ourselves. Why is it so comforting to focus on others, rather than ourselves? It may be that in those rare moments when we have an opportunity to just be with our thoughts, we begin to get in touch with the fact that, in many ways, we do not know how to be ourselves and we are living a façade. Questions begin to emerge such as “who am I really?,” “what do my friends really know about me?,” and “what is this ride of life all about?” When we sit and struggle with these questions, we might experience a bit of anxiety and unrest. In these periods of self-reflection, it is possible to fully grasp the notion that the most important relationship in our life is with our own selves.
That is why it is so important that we learn to love ourselves and strive to become our own person. Perhaps the ultimate loss in life would be to look back over with a sense of regret that we did not live the life we wanted to live for ourselves. As Jo Coudert wrote in Advice From a Failure,
It is essential that we become our own anchor in our life, fully grounded in the acceptance and knowledge that we are being ourselves and to allow ourselves to be enriched, not defined, by the friends and partners who love us for who we truly are.
Filed under: Lifestyle & Behaviors, Relationships, Stress, Women, Work/Life
