Episode 4| The Little Girl In Your Heart Is Welcome At My Lunch Table: Breaking Away From Not Being Yourself
Hi there. Welcome to One Day You Finally Knew: A Podcast For Women Breaking Away. I'm your host, Jessica Chasnoff. I'm a psychologist and coach, and I've had the great privilege of working for nearly 20 years, mainly with women in transition. What I've learned in this time is that for many of us, one day, we finally knew that it was time to.
I have had the great joy of walking alongside women as they go through this journey and I've been wanting to reach more women. So I've launched this podcast. May the offerings here be an aid and a balm to you on your unique journey, home to yourself.
Mmm... I'm just sitting here and feeling into this amazing gratitude that I have for this new practice of having a podcast. I have to say, I really didn't expect to love it this much. I mean, I love it. Can you tell? I love it. And I I'm also just so grateful, not only to be able to do this, but to have lovely listeners who are hopefully getting some benefit .
As always, you're welcome to send questions or check in with me. I would certainly love to know what you might want to hear about. It could be on my list anyway, but if not, might give me an idea for something to share. Today, I want to talk about breaking away from not being yourself. This is a big one. I mean, I feel like we could have multitudes of episodes on this.
This is something that is not easy. I don't think that anything I'm going to be talking about, on any episode of this podcast, is going to be easy. These are difficult things. These are really challenging practices. To really sit and be with yourself and to make this commitment that you are going to move toward living your own dreaming.
That's not something that we've been supported to do, most of us. I'm presently taking the three-year training to become a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner. I'm super excited about it. And I know I'll say more as time goes on about my experience.
It just reminds me, there was this moment where my teacher asked our cohort (this was in the beginning module, very first module) asked the cohort, "Do any of you remember being asked how you feel in your body, how you felt in your body when you were a child?" This is a group of like, 60 people. One person raised their hand, which is not unusual. Now, I do think this is something that is changing with this generation of children and even some of the teenagers, young adults I know have some of this onboard, which is fantastic, but I'll just say that that's not something that I got. It has taken me years to get to a place where I could actually get a sense of what my bodily felt experience was. It's something I still have to really think about at times. It's becoming more natural.
This is something that if we're taught, how does your body feel, right then we know what it means to feel good, because we understand the sensations that we're getting that feel good, that feel pleasant, that feel yummy, or the ones that feel painful or scary or difficult in some way. Or ones that feel neutral. When we don't have that capacity in us, it makes these kinds of practices more challenging.
And then of course, we have this layer of what society has said we're supposed to do. The dreaming of the patriarchy. The dreaming of our cultures. Our, whatever historical backgrounds we bring. Whatever is in our lineage, whatever intergenerational trauma we have. And then of course what's going on in our own families.
Right? All of that gets brought to] bear in the way that we move through the world. A lot of this stuff is challenging. I guess what I just want to say is hang in there. And if there's just a little something that you get just a little nugget of a, of a takeaway where you could maybe have just the slightest little bit of air, a little bit of breathing room into something, or a little, a little bit of light that comes through a crack that helps show you a way that's different, that's great. That's great, but all of this stuff, all of the stuff that I'm going to be recommending here takes time. So I do want to say that. This practice of breaking away from not being yourself, it's a lifetime of work.
Once we realize how much pain we have living others dreaming instead of our own, we can't really go back from that place. It's like the point of no return. It's like we've taken the red pill. I will tell you. I've taken a shit load of red pills in my 46 years. And I imagine there will be more.
I mean, just full disclosure. I mean, even today, I wanna give a shout out to this amazing friend of mine. We just had a little quickie text discussion this morning about whether I should edit a line that I had out of my last podcast episode. It was just so great. It was great because I needed to take it out. I'm learning how to be a white woman in this world that is trying to unlearn all the indoctrination into whiteness as supreme that this country has held from its inception. And, um, I fuck up
And, you know, there there's a given there that that's going to happen. And then what I'm learning though is I, I kind of have this inner knowing that I've fucked up. And then I, I check it out with, uh, another white woman because that's important. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna take it to a BIPOC woman and ask her. I'm going to take it to my white friend who's also doing her anti-racist work. And I just want to tell this woman how much I love her, because we had just had this quick moment. And I was like, "what do you think? I think I might need to take this out". And she was like, "yeah. You gotta take this out". And I was like," thank you. I love you. It's wonderful to not feel shamed by this process".
You know, this is a somatic process. This is in our bodies, all this indoctrination that we're working to unlearn. So anyway, that's actually just a side note here, but I do want to bring that in here. I'm working on it. I am doing the best I can. Once you know, you can do better. I think that's Maya Angelou. Yeah. When you know better, you do better. I'm trying to do that. And I will always try to do that. Oh, it makes me emotional talking about this. I'm just noticing, I like have this little lump in my throat. It's just like, ahhh. Anyway, I'm just feeling so much gratitude for my friend.
Moving forward. Back to being ourselves. Right. So, so always trying to model. My sweet friends. I just want to show you who I am here. If I show you who I am, and I do the best that I can to not edit out these parts that are flawed and growing and aching to show you that I can be who I am and you can be who you are and we can be in this space together. Ah, that's just such a beautiful thing. I'm just going to breathe into that for a second.
Ok, I want to tell you a little bit about my story, my ever unfolding story around becoming who I am, gaining more and more of my essence. I have big energy. I've always had this really big, bright energy. As I'm telling you this I'm really just feeling this little girl in my heart. If you have a little girl in your heart who had big energy and was told that she was too big, I'm holding her in my heart too, right now. You know, it's hard. We, you know, we get what we get. And I came in, not just with this big energy, but also, I think I was, I mean, I think I was five eight when I was like 10 or 11.
I was gangly. I, my hair, I mean, we did not have the product then that we do now. I have this mane of hair that is ethnic. This wild hair, super tall. I'm not going to lie. I don't have the same nose now that I did then. That's probably another story. I fell on my face when I was a kid. Couldn't breathe through one side of my nose. I was a runner. I couldn't breathe while I was running. So we had that sorted, but I also had it cosmetically altered, which I don't have any regrets about. None at all. And at the same time, part of why I had that done was because I was so tortured because of it.
I was tortured. Big Bird, um, all kinds of bird names, all kinds of bird noises were thrown at me. People would like, flap their wings as they went by. I also, from the time I was, I mean, it really started when I was eight. I was really smart and I read a lot and I used big words. I mean, I would have girls tell me they didn't want to be friends with me anymore because the words I used were too big.
So books were my friend. I'm very grateful to books. And to libraries. I mean, I love libraries more than many things on this earth, because I couldn't really stay friends long with anybody. There were so many ways that I didn't fit in. I looked weird. I was weird. I, um, I have that story, like so many girls do of going and sitting at the lunch table that I had sat at for a year and being told that I couldn't sit there anymore. And that, I mean, it started a couple of things. It started a couple of processes. One it started me going into therapy.
I got into therapy when I was 12. The lunch room moment happened at 12. But well before then, when all these things started happening, the, you're too big for the world thing, you know, I tried to make myself smaller. Ugh. What a pity. It takes a while to get over that when you've been doing it for years, from the time you're very young.
You know, I got this from my family too. Certainly my extended family and also my nuclear family as well. There were ways that it was definitely accepted by my nuclear family, but in others, not so much, I was too sensitive. Anybody else too sensitive? Told they were too sensitive when they were a child? Yeah. You know, I, I spent many years trying to make myself smaller to be accepted.
And thankfully over time that's become less and less, but I will say that it doesn't come without consequence. Right. You know, when you start believing, okay, I'm not too much for other people, they actually don't have the capacity to hold space for me and my beautiful, bright bigness. Once you get that, it's great.
And you can start moving from that place, but there are consequences, right? You move from relationships, you move from situations. As an adult, I would say basically, probably from my, I guess my mid thirties on I've been able to drop more and more of those layers of not being myself, but that's something that hasn't really fully come online until recently.
I mean, really fully. Like, I've realized that I had this thing. I had this thing. I've had it for a long time, which is this need for privacy. In some ways. I mean, I really want to say yes, privacy, we need privacy. We need to be mindful of what we share and what's just kept for ourselves, our besties. We need to be able to keep things for ourselves so we can grow into them. So we can work them through. Also, not as much so as a coach, but as a psychologist, there's this way that in this profession, we're supposed to comport ourselves in a certain way. Here's the thing. That just, it doesn't work for me as a human being to have to comport myself in a certain way.
I mean, ethics and morality. Yeah. Check. I got that. Kindness. Compassion. Empathy. Being congruent. Unconditional positive regard for my peeps. I got that. I hold a huge container. I have enormous capacity to hold the suffering of people that are in my world, both personally and professionally. And to me, that makes a great therapist.
But the thing is, that kind of went into it, went into this thing about privacy. And, and it's not without fear, by the way, that I say these things, knowing that they're going out into the world. You know, this is a podcast that's public. What I am realizing and what I want, probably more than anything to share with you and for you to be able to honor in yourself is that you do the world a service when you show up as who you are, completely, unabashedly. That's only something that I felt ready to start doing very recently. There is such a freedom, such an incredible liberation in stepping away from those shoulds and the demands from others that you behave a certain way.
As long as the behavior is kind and compassionate, open and humble with the view toward growth and evolution, there will be no harm from you showing all of who you are.
I feel like I want to say that again. I'm not going to be able to say it the same way, because once something is out of my mouth, it is gone. But, I really want to emphasize this. If you are showing up with kindness, with compassion, with openness, with care, with willingness to grow, with willingness to be humble, with a great desire to learn, to admit mistakes, you will harm no one. And if there is something that you do, that someone tells you hurt them, you can receive that, honor it and do your very best to mitigate it.
I cannot say enough how exhausting it is to hold part of yourself back. I know, you know what I mean. It eats at you. There's this inner knowing that there's something that just can't quite push through. And it hurts. All I can say to you, dear ones is when we give ourselves permission to break away from who we are not, we give ourselves and the whole world permission to show up as they are.
And it's not without fear. Okay. Look, when I launched the first episode of this podcast, I didn't take a shit for two days because I was so uptight about being received in this way. And, is this really okay? My body was like, eeek! I gotta hold onto this, curl up into myself. Yeah. That's gonna happen. Do it anyway. I would be honored if you would allow me to be a voice that you can listen to that says, be afraid and do it anyway.
Do it anyway. With kindness, with compassion. Not just for others, but for yourself. It's a big deal coming out of that place that we often live, which is, as others want to see us, there's still that little girl in me that something drops out of my mouth and it lands like a lead balloon. And I can feel like, ooh, am I going to get sent away from this lunch table.
That lives in me. I'm sure it lives in many of you too. But you know what? I will always be welcome at my lunch table. I will never turn myself away. And I want you to be able to do that for yourself too. I also want you to be able to, if you feel like your people that you're with right now, aren't getting to see you, see if you can start showing yourself a little bit more.
If they don't want it, then you're gathering some information now aren't you. There is a place for everyone. Let me say this differently. I want so much for there to be a place for everyone. And I believe that there is, but we have to be figuring it all out together, finding our safety and readiness within ourselves and also then finding it in others.
That is the way we do it. You're not going to feel 100% ready. I have a certain level of readiness. Readiness enough to be doing this, but not enough that I don't get neurotic. Not enough that I don't put a Reel out on Instagram and then be like, oh my God.
I remember I was like 13. I had a friend that, I said something corny, and she looked at me with such derision. Just utter derision and said, "you are such a cornball". And I mean, of course I felt terrible then. Right. Felt terrible then, but I am a cornball and I am cool with that.
Try it on. See what happens. Just explore this. Explore it along with me. Be yourself. Break away from not being yourself. Life is both too short and too long, my darlings to not be offering the fullness of who we are to this world. I know this to be true. I know it. And it's hard, but I'm right here with you. I'm right here with you. I'm doing it with you.
I'm scared with you. I'm leaping with you. Let's do this together.
Thanks for listening today. If you are enjoying this podcast, I would be ever so grateful if you would hit subscribe or follow and leave a review. That way, when other women come check it out, they might be a little more likely to give it a listen. I'll look forward to the unfoldment between now and next time we come together.
See you soon.