Approval

Where and who do you look to for approval? Why?

I find personal philosophies and beliefs about myself tend to ebb and flow like the tide to the pull of the moon. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in my professional goals and plans that I forget why I am doing what I do, and then someone says something and the world turns topsy-turvy and I am thrown off my white charger and into a mud puddle, wondering how the heck I got here when I was so high only a moment before.

You see this proverbial white charger is my need for others approval and guidance. But when riding that horse I find I’m thrown more often than not, and in those instances of being stuck in the mire I find myself judging, well, myself as I feel I should in the moment, and not realizing that I may have hopped on a horse that I should never have looked at in the first place. Some people no more deserve the power to approve of you than a perfect stranger does. Perhaps we hardly know these people but we build up such pictures in our heads of who they are because we find kinship or a common interest with them and then vroom off we go with this idea of a person of whom we have only had a glimpse. While to us we have suddenly shared all of life’s intricate moments and know them like the back of our hands we’ve left the real, unknowing person back where we started probably wondering why we just took off in our car and washed them in a puff of exhaust backfire. “Who the heck was that?”

Perhaps this is why well known celebrities are some of the highest paid individuals , and why movies with celebrities that are well known tend to be box office hits… the more well liked a person seems to be, the more desperate we are for their approval and to be involved in their life!

Why is it so engrained in human nature to seek not only the approval of those you look up to and consider perfect but to also to be seen as flawless by all others? Maybe it dates back to our childhood and not receiving the approval that we need when we are in our developmental stages; perhaps our targets of infatuation were crushes, or the homecoming queen or popular kids squad, etc. perhaps it was a parent who didn’t have time for us, or a sibling who made up their own negative or disapproving opinion of who we were before we even knew. I really believe most struggles tend to date back to how we were raised and the way we approach the world moving from there. In another way, maybe we feel the ancient need to fit in much like a sheep might, to protect ourselves from those who may be “out to get us”, but how does that need fit into a model in today’s society?

I find there to be some discrepancy with social media in that it is designed specifically to make others envious of our lives. With the invention of media filters, photo shop and post sharing we have managed to create this alternate perfect society. We find ourselves bitter and resentful because our real lives don’t look like those pictures on instagram or facebook, and so we then take pictures and share photos of ourselves with some filter or touch ups here and there and continue the cycle. To top all of that off we can’t possible share our struggles, because no one else does, and this mindset causes an influx of perfectly bitter, lonely and jealous individuals who are not living the lives they believe they should be.

So here I am, writing a blog about approval. I feel it. I feel the obsessive need to have acceptance, to have people look at my life or my career and think “she’s really got her crap together, doesn’t she?” but the reality is… I don’t. I never will. I am only human and with this comes the inevitable moment when I find myself sitting in a puddle of mud, thinking bitterly about the arse of a charger that dumped me, instead of the fact that I am on a dirt road, the sun setting in a wash of gold and birds singing as they bed down in their nests within the trees. A light breeze tickles a wet strand of hair on my face. It’s a beautiful September evening, my favorite month, and that charger is standing a ways away glowering at me because he is a figure of my imagination and doesn’t know what to do with himself now that he’s launched me in the mud.

Going back to my previous post; can there be beauty without it’s opposite? Would I have noticed the sunset whilst desperately pretending to be perfect on my high horse as he sprinted back to the barn? or is the beauty perhaps supposed to be found or noticed only in the puddle of mud? Is it not in the moments of struggle that we grow?

I have met so many amazing people through horses and homesteading, I would hope that those that I have met would never put me up on a pedestal and give me the power to make them feel inadequate, it means much more to me to be a friend than to be seen as a perfect person and to be put on a pedestal. And so, in the same way that I request truth and friendship, that is all I must choose to offer to others.

I don’t share my life to make people jealous. I share it to bring people into it, to help them see the small moments that I am blessed to see, or learn the techniques that I have found to be helpful in my journey so that they can be successful in theirs. I want to bring people to a place of happiness and peace through this homesteading life, but these goals can be so hard to achieve or even see when I am stuck in a mindset of idolizing others whose attention I crave and not allowing myself the grace for my farm to not be perfect, my horses to have occasional bad habits or to allow people to second guess my training methods and ask questions when what I say makes no sense.

I will always struggle with this need for acceptance; it is only human. But to be who I want to be and live my life to the fullest I cannot be content to stay stagnant in the same spot in my life; content with being less than God has made me to be. You see, pretending or believing to be something I am not is so much less than the richness of being who I was intended to be through Him. It takes growth to be who one is meant to be, and growth can’t happen without the realization, humility and acceptance of wrong. Why do we fight so much to appear as if we have no imperfections or struggles? Why do we disguise our personal growth?