How much are you ever going to achieve if your first instinct is to hide?
Something happens when you decide to stop hiding.
Once you decide to stop being a shrinking violet – once you stop being terrified of being judged and being judged to be not good enough there’s a magic that starts unfurling from inside you.
It’s like that line from the Irish poet Wilfred O’Dea:
“Let the end of hiding call out everything that’s been hidden.”
Too many of us think that we need to present in a particular way to the world. We think the world needs us to be more manly or more womanly – to be more articulate and intelligent, or less conceited and pompous; to be tougher or stronger or more caring or whatever.
At a fundamental level we don’t believe that we are good enough, and so we try to offer the world what we think the world wants.
And we tie ourselves up in knots trying to anticipate what some abstract concept of “the world” wants – as if it wants a singular thing. As if there’s some way of being in the world where the world looks at us and goes, “Yep. Nailed it. You’re a winner.”
But the fundamental idea here – and the great mistake we make – is thinking that whatever the world wants, it isn’t us – it isn’t our raw and unfiltered selves. It’s something else.
We need to be something else.
But while we are projecting one thing, we are also hiding that raw and essential self away.
You can’t pretend to be a hard-as-nails warrior type, when it’s clear that you work in an office and love reading books.
Pretending and projecting to be something necessarily involves hiding our true selves away.
But something amazing happens once we make the decision to stop hiding our fundamental and true selves away.
Because now we are no longer limited by the boxes we have built for ourselves.
For most of us, the picture we have in our heads about “what the world wants from us” is pretty two-dimensional. It doesn’t have a lot of depth or detail.
And as such, it doesn’t give us a lot of room to move.
But when we decide to stop hiding, we’re no longer trying to shoe-horn ourselves into boxes, and we’re free to let all sorts of things come through and express themselves.
And that’s when the magic really starts flowing.
That’s when there’s the possibility of something great moving through us – for an inspired and creative genius to express itself in the freedom we create for it.
And this is your birthright. These are the talents you have been giving. Don’t’ leave your talents buried in the garden. Call them through and offer them to the world.
But this process can only happen once you stop trying to hide all the time.
Let the end of hiding call out everything that’s been hidden.
You are capable of so much more than you think.
DB