Twice in the past two days I’ve encountered the word admired…
A dear, brave friend voicing a question reverberating around inside her like bellows bouncing off canyon walls:
“Do I live in a way that chooses to be admired at the cost of feeling connected?”
A narrator’s thoughts in Kristin Hannah’s novel The Nightingale:
“If I had told him the truth long ago, or had danced or drunk or sung more, may he would have seen ME more than a dependable, ordinary mother. He loves a version of me that is incomplete. I always thought it was what I wanted: to be loved and admired. Now I think perhaps I’d like to be known.”
I take note of these moments as someone also seeking to turn away from the instinct to impress that hinders me from closeness with others. After years in a family dynamic that bred competition with my own mother, the journey of surrendering the strategy of admiration has been long. Desperate for the fleeting sense of safety that came with having the upper-hand, even at the age of seven, it was always a catch 22. Neither the resentment that “winning” inevitably brought nor the humiliation that accompanied “losing” allowed me to draw close to my mom.
Someone once said to me:
“You are too good of a woman to invite people not to like you.”
That is what the quest for admiration, a rising above, invites--a distaste for and distance from the goodness of who we are.
How was being known and connected unavailable to you growing up?What traits or accomplishments were admired in your family culture? How was your unique form of “achievement” your best strategy for connection then, but now, years later, is actually sabotaging belonging?