“Today you are You, that is truer that true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.” -Dr. Seuss
Most of us probably know the story of the Ugly Duckling. It tells the tale of a swan whose egg accidently rolls into the nest of a mother duck. After all of the eggs have hatched, the mother duck has several cute baby ducklings and one ugly duckling. This ugly duckling is ridiculed and made fun of by not only by the duck family, but also all of the other barnyard animals. So, he decides to leave the farm because of the abuse. While on his own he sees a flock of beautiful swans flying above and wishes he could be like them. He survives the winter on his own, scared and alone. The next spring he sees the flock of swans again on a pond and goes to them, expecting they will kill him for his ugliness. Instead, to his surprise, they accept him as one of their own. He looks down at his own reflection in the water and realizes that through the cold, rough winter, as he grew into his adultness, he became a beautiful swan.
How many of us feel like this misunderstood and rejected baby “duckling” sometimes? We want to feel like we fit in and belong somewhere, like there is someone out there who will understand us, but yet it seems like we don’t. We might try to look or act a certain way to feel accepted; but that is not always who we really are. It is a mask we put on to feel accepted. Sometimes we might have been wearing it for so long we don’t really notice it any more. We become a fake version of our true self.
We have a cultural practice in our country that is more of an unspoken rule stating we should be happy, or at least appear to be happy, all the time. Whether it is out of consideration for others and not wanting them to worry about us or we are trying to fake it until it makes us happy, I don’t know. We will put on a brave face, smile and tell others (and ourselves) that everything is fine while on the inside we are falling apart, hurting, sick, grieving or a multitude of other things. Our society seems to say “if you are not happy all of the time there must be something wrong with you”, but if we think about it, this doesn’t make sense. If you are always happy, how do you know what happy is? If you are never sad or mad or anything else, there is nothing to compare happy to.
We wear masks and hind our true feelings so others will not worry or feel bad for us. We hide ourselves from our real feelings so that we don’t have to feel the pain and uncomfortableness of unpleasant feelings. Yet, the feelings aren’t really gone. They are still there, pushed down below the surface, growing and festering. Just because I put food I don’t like under my napkin and pretend it’s not there does not mean it doesn’t exist. It is still there, I’m just not looking at it. Hiding our feelings is like the food under the napkin. They are still there and don’t go away just because we are not paying attention to them.
Instead, if we start to take the mask off, we start to see who we really are. If we start to let our feelings show, regardless of what they are, we are able to start to show our true selves. Instead of hiding the uncomfortableness of “ugly” feelings, if we release them we start to feel free, relaxed, and less stressed. We are able to start to feel more like our true selves. Just as the Ugly Duckling hid from the other animals on the farm so they would not see his “ugliness”, we hid our ugliness from the world around us. However, as the mask was taken off of the duckling when he gave into facing his fears of approaching the beautiful swans, he started to see his true self. And it was much different than he imagined. He was beautiful too.
As we start to find our true selves, we often find our own beauty.