Naked Truths | Reclaiming Who You Were Before the World Told You to Hide
Spoiler alert: we are born naked—bare-skinned and bare-souled, wide-eyed and wobbly, wailing out our needs and shrieking at simple joys, but none of us stay that way.
Somewhere along the way, we learn it isn’t safe to be who we really are—our raw, needy, messy, beautiful, most honest selves. So we find ways to hide. We try on personas like costumes: the good girl, the achiever, the funny one, the easygoing one. We become whoever seems most likely to earn us a seat at life’s cafeteria table.
But here’s the cosmic joke: the layers we think are protecting us become the source of our pain. Suddenly, life doesn’t fit, like we accidentally ordered it two sizes too small. Cue the questions: What’s wrong with me? How did I get here? And most importantly, do I need to burn my life to the ground or just take a really good nap?
As a psychotherapist and an Enneagram facilitator, I’ve seen this a thousand times. I’ve also lived it.
Like many therapists, my path to “professional” began at “patient”. I was a floundering, existentially fraught twenty-two-year-old when I finally went to therapy. The idea that anything can be “finally” at twenty-two continues to blow my mind. After years of undiagnosed depression, disordered eating, and a few hospital visits, you better believe it felt pretty final. Getting through the day was a grind. I could slap on a smile and laugh at a joke, but I wasn’t who I wanted to be or where I wanted to be. I always felt deeply and essentially… different.
And like Samantha Baker for Jake Ryan, I kept waiting for the real me, the right me, to arrive.
I chalked the perpetual longing, exhaustion, overwhelm, anxiety, and anorexia up to good ol’-fashioned growing pains. I told myself it was just part of becoming an adult, and once I got to adulthood, I could be “who I wanted to be”—like Ariel, GI Joe, Mom, Dad, and a handful of B-team Care Bears had taught me. And I knew exactly who I wanted to be too: lovable, irresistible, witty, maybe with a little mystery thrown in for good measure (ideally, the French kind). I wanted to be kind and humble, too, a decent Christian (thankfully, I had enough self-awareness to aim for just “decent” in this department). I figured that if I put in the work, then it (I) would happen.
We Xennials got a ton of messaging that told us “who we were” was entirely our decision—a matter of elbow grease and intention. We could choose to be vivacious, or brooding, or sassy, or funny. We could choose to be thoughtful or serene (but y’all, fat chance in my case).
On the outside, the idea that identity was something malleable, a messy hunk of stuff we could slap on a pottery bench and shape all on our own, was deliciously empowering. Or at least, it was supposed to be. On the inside, it was ruinous. “Fake it ‘til you make it” was the credo of the times, and plenty of us, myself included, almost didn’t make it at all.
It’s taken me years of therapy, on both the couch and in the spinny chair, to understand the truth: becoming someone isn’t our job; being ourselves is.
At the time, I was living out of a binding story I now hear every week in my work as a therapist. It goes a little something like this: “I feel like if I don’t stand out, no one will notice me. If I make myself unforgettable, then I’ll be loved.”
I didn’t know it yet, but I was an Enneagram Four, The Romantic, and that story was their signature. Every type has a similar story – while each is beautifully unique, they also have a “distress mode” they slip into when life gets hard. They try to fix this by wrapping themselves in thick layers of striving, ego (the maladaptive kind), and fear until they lose sight of who they really are.
Friends, I’m excited to invite you on a journey. It’s time to strip it all down. Let’s find our way back to, as Ian Cron says, “who we were before the world told us who we should be.”
You ready?
Love,
Katie
