What being ugly can teach us
I fell down a short youtube rabbithole yesterday 🐇, and boy was I glad I did. I fell right into this TedX talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbxinUJcLGg
If you've got yourself 16 minutes, give it a watch. Man, that was powerful.
You see, that speaker is ugly. I feel a bit weird saying it, but it's true. He's ugly enough that he wrote a book called "Ugly". And yet for all that ugliness, as he bares his soul a beauty shines through. 💙💙
He talks about owning his face. And about how hard it was for him to get there.
And about how the fact that he's ugly has allowed him to own his own face perhaps more easily than any of us get to own ours.
Let that sink in a moment.
🤔
Because he had less to lose, he was more able to make the journey and embrace who he was.
The same thing happened in Dante's Inferno (or at least, the Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle take on it). 😈 Those who were in Purgatory (which was by all accounts decent) had the hardest time descending through hell to escape to heaven because they had so much to lose. By contrast, those wading in boiling blood in the fifth circle of hell had less to lose and found it easier to leave and take the risk.
I've seen this in lawyers too. Unhappy lawyers often find it harder to own their own truth because on the outside they often have lives that others would love to have. I want to say that again: Because they have lives others would love to have, they often find it harder to own their own truth.
It's hard to own your own truth when things are "objectively" good but they don't feel subjectively good or "right" for you. When you take a risk and you're worried others will judge you for "throwing away" something great. 🤷♂️ But is it truly great if it doesn't feel so?
Part of the problem is that we (in many cases rightly) tell ourselves that most of what we have is good, and we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
So how do you move past this stuckness? 🚦
The first step is awareness. What's causing the disconnect between what's objectively good and what you feel?
Sometimes it's the entire life to blame. Sometimes it's just one part of it. The pressure you put on yourself. The worry you have about how things will turn out. The story you tell yourself about where you're going and who you are.
And also the awareness of how the status quo serves you. In many cases, if it didn't, you likely would have changed it already.
Once you've become aware (of what's going on, of the costs, the benefits, etc), the next steps usually become apparent.
As they say, this life is both far too long, and far too short, to be doing something you don't want to do.
Shine on.
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