My Idealised Self Wants To... Be Someone Who Doesn't Take Things To Heart (vol. 1)
In the first of this series, I talk being someone who takes things to heart and what that's revealed about me as a person.
What type of person would you like to be? Who or what do you think you’re not like? And what can you learn and embrace about yourself through recognition of who you are? In this series, I want to help you explore this. I’ll talk about who I’d like to be while also sharing what I know about myself. I hope that this is an invitation to be compassionately curious about who you think you are.
[Paid subscribers: An audio version is available when you scroll down to the paid subscriber section, along with What I’ve Learned I Need To Do, journaling prompts, and access to an archive masterclass, How To Get Back On Track When You Lose Your Way or Hit A Rough Patch.]
We all have an idealised self, the perfect or better-than-our-current-reality version of ourselves that we aspire to be or think we should be, and so give ourselves a hard time about not being it yet (or keep pushing ourselves to become it). Part of knowing ourselves is being more honest about who we are, which means understanding who we’re not without shaming ourselves and also giving us the freedom and flexibility to evolve.
My idealised self wants me to be someone who doesn’t take things to heart.
Oh, to just lets things bounce off me and be somebody who doesn’t sometimes reel and feel in emotional turmoil in the face of unsettling and possibly shady behaviour.
In reality, I’m someone who feels deeply and sometimes knows things without knowing why I know them (claircognizance, apparently). I’ve been like this for as long as I can remember; it’s just that until my late twenties, I actively used people pleasing to suppress and repress my needs, expectations, desires, feelings and opinions as a means of survival.
Confronting myself, confronting my past and working through trauma has meant feeling more of my feelings. And even though it’s a pain in the wotsits sometimes, I’d take being aware of my feelings any day over the consequences of being emotionally shut down.
While I’ve learned not to take other people’s feelings and behaviour so personally, a part of me will still struggle with my effort not delivering a desired outcome.
When you grow up afraid and on guard all the time, you get into the pesky habit of internalising other people’s feelings and behaviour. You read silence, changes in mood and behaviour, mismatched actions and words, the way someone comes up the stairs or closes the door, as a sign of something you’ve failed to be or do or imminent danger. You fill in silence, gaps, discomfort, with self-blame and story. Thankfully, I’m further and further away from these habits that used to be second nature to me.
I was also taught that it’s crucial to be perfect if you want to be loved and succeed in life, and if you’re not, then at least give it your utmost effort.
My people-pleasing style (I talk about the five styles in my book The Joy of Saying No) is efforting, along with some avoiding and gooding thrown in for good measure. I’m someone who learned to associate effort with outcomes and who also uses effort to feel in control and be “good”. Avoiding discomforting others by avoiding myself was also a key part of my survival.
Even though I’m forty-five and know that I am not my efforts and that I don’t have to be perfect for anything or anyone, I am a recovering people pleaser, so I’m unlearning the habits tied up in this mentality. It’s ongoing and will always be a part of my life.
I’d like to be someone who doesn’t take things to heart, but sometimes I do. I can be hard on myself when I don’t meet my own [possibly unrealistic at times] expectations.
In acknowledging the brooding and retreating a little into myself, I’ve recognised that I’m someone who gets carried away and can be unrealistic with myself. These characteristics can make you very creative and push you into places you might not go otherwise, but they can also bring you crashing back down to earth with a burnout or frustration-and-grieving bump.
They can also make you go way past your limits, and so it makes sense that I do take things to heart because it’s inevitably off of the back of not having listened to myself in some way.
When I consider why the idealised version of me wants to be someone who doesn’t take things to heart, I can see it’s partly driven by the notion that if I were that person, I would ‘do’ more. It’s this sense that I’d be a more productive, successful, achieving person if only I were a bit more Teflon-coated.
Little Nat, my inner child, imagines that everyone else has their lives and families so much more “together”. You know, less effed up. She’s felt there’s something wrong with her for the speed at which it’s sometimes taken me to “get over” something.
Umm, no. I’ve learned that not all of the people who “let things bounce off [them]” are actually happy and themselves. I used to be that person, and I wound up very unwell!
While I might take things to heart sometimes, I don’t blame myself for other people’s shady behaviour. Mega progress from the first almost thirty years of my life! I’ve also found that my recovery time from setbacks and disappointments has shrunk because I allow myself to feel and work through things instead of stuffing things down and hoping that escaping them by throwing myself into “trying harder” will solve everything. I don’t hoard negative stories and feelings about myself anymore, so things inevitably shake out and gradually feel better.
Despite being very sensitive and so sometimes feeling like my body doesn’t let anything pass, I am also resilient. And I think it’s important to highlight this because many of us judge ourselves for being a “feeler”, “empathic”, “sensitive”, “taking things to heart”, having mistakes and failures, or, yes, traumas, and assume that it means we’re “not resilient” (or resilient enough). Nope, you’re okay. You’ve weathered some things; you’ve been through some stuff; you’ve travelled a journey to this point.
Taking things to heart makes you human—just don’t let the past and other people’s feelings and behaviour own you.
Can you learn to take stuff less personally? Absofrickenlutely. It’s crucial to evolve your boundaries so that you get to a more truthful place that allows you to navigate and weather life so that you can flourish. Here’s a guide I wrote on how to stop taking things so personally.
If you allow yourself to break patterns and positively learn from experiences, it also builds resilience for what I call life’s inevitables—stress, conflict, criticism, disappointment, loss, and rejection.
My idealised self isn’t entirely off base in wanting to be someone who doesn’t take things personally. There’s always room to do less of it. But I’m not going to stop taking things personally because I feel, just with more boundaries now. I’ll take things less personally in service of becoming more of who I really am, not in service of ho-ing myself out to be more “productive” and to pursue other people’s version of “success”.
There will always be a gap between your actual and idealised self.
It’s human, and our needs, desires, expectations, and, yes, sometimes our emotional baggage inform this ideal as well as whether there’s a gap or a gulf.
The key is discerning what’s useful, loving, and genuinely desired in this potential future version of yourself from what isn’t. It’s also showing more appreciation for and reframing what you know about yourself. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing, and you can have things you want to grow into while also loving, caring for, trusting, and respecting the person you are now and have been. You’d be amazed how many of us aspire to be someone we don’t really want or even need to be.
Understanding yourself and why you do things in the way that you do them for as long as you’ve done them means that you can take better care of yourself and create healthier boundaries that give you the freedom, safety, and joy to be yourself.