Being true

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet, act I, scene iii 

 Last night, The Red-Headed Menace (RHM) was talking to the object of his affections on Facebook Chat.  I happened to glance over and catch part of their conversation.  They were discussing the upcoming semester in language arts.

RHM:  What do you think of the poetry unit?
OA: I hate it.  I hate writing.
RHM: I do too.

Wait, what?!  This is the kid that has always written poetry for the sheer joy of it.  The kid who wrote an actual honest-to-God sonnet (a Petrarchan sonnet, with proper meter and rhyme scheme) when he was in eighth grade for some girl he had a crush on.  This kid loves to write. (He has more problems with prose: capitalization and spelling are not his forte.)

I broke in and asked him about this.  "Oh, I hate school-type writing," he said with a hangdog look.  Yeah, right.  I took the proper parental course of action and counseled him, much as Polonius did Laertes, to simply be himself. I told him that he needed to know that people liked him for who he was, not for some facade he chose to show them.

The truth is, though, is that so many of us do this.  We seek approval from others, especially people who love us, and sometimes that gets in the way of being honest about who we are.  We pretend to have attributes we don't, or to be less flawed, than we really are.  Maybe we don't lie, but we're less than revealing.  We become afraid that somehow we're not good enough.  So many of us suffer from "impostor syndrome." Or, alternatively, some of us dwell on our flaws, thinking, perhaps unconsciously, that it is better to drive people away than to be left.

Well we all fall in love
But we disregard the danger
Though we share so many secrets
There are some we never tell
Why were you so surprised
That you never saw the stranger?
Did you ever let your lover
See the stranger in yourself?
Billy Joel, "The Stranger"

Billy Joel notwithstanding, the hardest thing I have had to learn in my *cough* forty-something *cough* years is to not lie about who I am.  I work hard on being myself around people.  This does not mean I divulge everything about myself, but it does mean that I do not let the fact that I have been told that I am intimidating and a bit scary make me change the way I am in the world.  If some people can't deal with me the way that I am, it's their loss.  I have come a long way from the girl who was counseled by her high school friends that she was "too smart," and who would have given her right arm to know how to act dumber so that people would like her.

I only hope my kid figures this out.  Because he is pretty damned amazing, and deserves to be surrounded by people who understand and appreciate him.