This exercise will help you begin to reconnect with your authentic self.
Pause for a moment and think about which false selves you may have developed over your lifetime. Remember that each one of them came into existence to keep you safe. They’re not bad, they’ve just outlived their purpose and they prevent you from living authentically. Take out your journal. Close your eyes and allow yourself to slide backwards along the timeline of your life. Be as honest as you’re able about the sub-personalities you’ve developed.
For example, perhaps as a girl you relieved household tensions by making people laugh, so as an adult you continue to clown your way through life – never showing your tears and keeping everyone else smiling at your own expense. Or maybe you were the ‘good’ girl who was rewarded for working hard, and now you’re at the top of a career ladder and you have no idea why you climbed it.
Perhaps you gained your sense of worth by care-taking an alcoholic or otherwise sick parent and now continue to give more than you have and wonder why you are always running on empty. Or maybe you grew up in an environment where there was nobody you could rely on and so you developed a mask of independence that leaves you seemingly invincible but horribly alone.
It may be difficult to draw sharp distinctions between the characters you’ve played, whose boundaries may conflict and overlap. Were you Mummy’s little helper or Daddy’s princess? Were you the intellectual or the dropout? Were you the peacemaker or the truth-teller (or both)? Were you a people-pleaser, a party-girl, a loner or a saint? Were you Miss Perfect, a rebel or a critic who sat on the sidelines? Or were you invisible? Write down every sub-personality you find.
Each of us will have developed a number of selves to ensure our survival. Normally you’ll find five or six dominant ones that are still with you in adult life.
Now take every one that you’ve found and visualize her as a separate person. Greet her and thank her for the protection she has given you. Each of them has helped to keep you safe.
When you’ve worked through your list take five deep breaths in and out and congratulate yourself. This is an important step you’ve taken. Even though these sub-personalities will emerge and sometimes still be useful, from now on you will see them for what they are – masks that you’ve needed to wear – and you will not mistake them for yourself. Who you truly are lies beneath and beyond them, and you are now on your journey to meet her.
As you go through your day try to notice when you slip into one of your sub-personalities. Practising honesty will enable you to identify them and then let them gently drop away, in the same way that a husk drops from a seed.
When I told the school careers advisor that I wanted to be a secretary at the BBC (I didn’t dare tell her that I wanted to be a reporter because I didn’t think it would ever be possible), she laughed at me and said, ‘Don’t you think every girl wants to do that? Why don’t you be a bit more realistic and work at the insurance company? They’re always looking for typists.’ When, years later, I found myself reporting for the BBC, I always carried a sense that I should be in the typing pool rather than on air. While the men around me had a sense of entitlement and clearly planned their career progression, I always felt as if I was begging to be allowed to do what I loved rather than claiming my rightful place at the table.
JN
Other people’s stuff
‘When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.’
BETTY FRIEDAN
How we are seen by others and society as a whole informs how we see ourselves. The messages we’re given as women about what it is and isn’t OK for us to do, feel, look like or want, get absorbed.
Whether the message is that we need to be passive and wait to be chosen or that we should try to have it all – children and the seat in the boardroom – the complex truth of who we are gets obscured. Our sense of what is possible is limited and we bury parts of ourselves, fearing we won’t fit into the world as it is.
Similarly our perception of our physical self gets distorted by the constant messages we receive about what we should and shouldn’t wear, weigh and eat, and how we should or shouldn’t look. No matter how hard we try, it’s difficult not to be affected. They’re all around us in what we read and hear, and in the images we see on a daily basis. Whether it’s scantily clad, airbrushed models staring down at us from billboards or magazine covers, or images on social media, the message is the same: it’s not OK to be who we are.
The price of social media
The stress that social media is causing young women is heavily implicated in a dramatic rise in mental illness. Levels of self-harm, post-traumatic stress disorder and chronic mental illness are all on the increase.6 A quarter of 16–24-year-old women have anxiety, depression, panic disorders, phobias or obsessive compulsive disorder according to UK government-funded research.7 And the proportion of young women self-harming has trebled between 2007 and 2014.
At this stage of WE’s journey your goal is to discover and know your true self. Becoming conscious of those messages is the first stage to escaping their toxic power.
When I was broadcasting I felt obliged to don the ‘uniform’ – power suit and heels – that my news editors and the industry expected. I was very conscious that I was perpetuating the stereotypes I hoped my work would dispel, but I felt trapped. If I didn’t look the part I wouldn’t get to play the part. And I desperately wanted the part. So I dressed up and pretended to be someone I was not in order to get the chance to tell the truth – one of the many acts of hypocrisy that I engaged in to become ‘successful’. I became part of the problem that I was hoping to solve and each time I put on my work suits I felt myself getting more and more estranged from my real self and my levels of internal self-hatred grew.
JN
I agreed to participate in photoshoots when I was younger that I would advise myself against in retrospect, where my desire to be liked or found attractive overrode that small voice that wanted to say, ‘I’m not OK with this’. Whether it was not wanting to upset the male photographer or letting my ego get caught up in the attention, I hadn’t yet found that part of my brain. Not just the part that could stand up for myself and say I will not participate in an act that feels shameful because it is exposing too much of myself for a stranger’s gaze, but the part that might recognize that what I was participating in was a bigger issue and that by agreeing to do the shoot I was colluding in a far darker message about women and our objectification.
GA
It’s easy to forget how relatively recently women – even in the developed Western hemisphere – won basic legal rights. A hundred years ago, women in the US and UK weren’t allowed to vote and it wasn’t until 1920 and 1928 respectively that women gained voting parity with men. And until the 1990s our husbands could legally rape us. For the bulk of legal history we’ve been treated as inferior and the legacy of centuries of inequality continues to exact its toll on our sense of who we are.
Leading female scientists, politicians and commentators still find that if they speak publicly, their looks and clothes are dissected in ways that simply don’t happen to men, reinforcing the sense that beneath the talk of equality we remain objects to be lusted over, dominated and possessed, rather than equals.
To get a snapshot of the extent to which equality is still resisted take a look at the comments that women who write about equality generate online – threats of sexual assault and even death are commonplace. As a result, whatever strides the world is making towards equality, the mirror we’re reflected back in is distorted and, in turn, can corrupt and limit how we perceive ourselves.
Under cover
Too often we can feel we have to disguise our real physical self to match artificial notions of femininity that have largely been created by men. Whether we’re forcing our feet into heels so high they damage our backs or suppressing what