Give Yourself Permission to Be Human

The other night, I caught myself stepping over something that wasn’t there.

If you’ve been following along with my move to New York, you know my dog Rooney has been having a TIME. He’s a Rhodesian Ridgeback who spent most of his life in Houston, and his nervous system has essentially rejected city living. The noises, the people, the elevators, the fact that I occasionally have the audacity to leave the apartment without him—all of it.

When we moved into our new apartment, we put a gate across the hallway to keep him out of the living room when we weren’t home. For three months, every time I walked from the kitchen to the bedroom, I had to step over the bottom of this gate and slightly turn my body to get through it.

Eventually, Rooney won the battle. The gate was damaging the wall, he kept finding ways around it, and I was losing my mind. So I took it down.

The next night, I was sitting at my kitchen table for a women’s group when I had to grab a book from my bedroom. I got up, walked down the hallway on autopilot, and when I got to the spot where the gate had been, my foot automatically lifted and my body turned sideways to step through it.

Except there was no gate.

I knew there was no gate. I was the one who had taken the damn thing down. I could literally see it sitting against the wall. My brain knew the obstacle was gone, but my body was still bracing for it.

And I just stood there thinking, Well, shit.

Because it’s never about the dog gate.

Sometimes the gate is gone, but you’re still bracing for it

This is one of the reasons I teach personal development through Body • Brain • Behavior. We spend so much time focusing on what we consciously believe, but our bodies learn patterns too. Sometimes you can know something isn’t true anymore while your body is still responding as if it is.

That stupid gate made me realize I had been doing the exact same thing in some of my closest relationships.

I have an old belief that I’m a bad person. I don’t consciously believe that anymore, but for a long time, being liked, being good, being approved of and making sure people saw me a certain way were all tangled together. So when someone I really love is disappointed in me, there is still a part of me that braces.

My body reacts first, and then my brain gets to work: No, no, no. That’s not what happened. Let me explain. You don’t understand what I meant.

I used to think I was simply explaining myself. But lately, I’ve realized there is a difference between explaining yourself and trying to control someone else’s perception of you.

Sometimes defending yourself is really an attempt to make sure the other person arrives at the conclusion you want them to arrive at: I’m good. I was right. I didn’t do anything wrong.

Because if I can convince you of that, I don’t have to sit with the possibility that maybe you think something about me that I don’t like.

Why I was always trying to be a 10

Recently, I had a conversation with one of my best friends where I brought up something that had bothered me. During that conversation, she brought up something I had done that had bothered her.

Immediately, I wanted to defend myself. I wanted to explain why what she was saying wasn’t quite right, why I had done what I did, what my intentions were, and what other information she was missing. I wanted to give her enough context that, by the end of my explanation, she would see me the way I wanted to be seen again.

And this is where I started thinking about it as a scale from zero to 10.

Imagine that a 10 is the completely right version of you. The version with the best intentions who handled everything correctly and has nothing to apologize for. A zero would be the opposite: completely wrong, completely at fault, the villain of the story.

Without realizing it, I was entering conflict trying to prove I was a 10.

If someone was disappointed in me or brought up something I had done, I didn’t want them to leave the conversation thinking, Meg could have handled that better. I wanted to explain myself until they understood that I had a reason, my intentions were good, and therefore I was still right. I wasn’t just trying to give them context. I was trying to move their perception of me back to a 10.

And I think that was connected to this old belief that if I wasn’t the 10, then somehow I was the zero.

If I did something selfish, maybe I was selfish. If I hurt someone, maybe I was a bad friend. If someone was disappointed in me, maybe I had failed them. There wasn’t a lot of room between what I did and who I was, so of course I fought like hell to stay on the 10 side of the scale.

But there is an enormous amount of space between 10 and zero.

What if I’m just a 5?

The 5 isn’t a rating of my worth. It isn’t me saying I’m mediocre or only halfway good. The 5 represents the middle—the very normal, imperfect reality of being human. Maybe my intentions were good and I handled something poorly. Maybe I don’t completely agree with your version of events and I can understand why you’re hurt. Maybe I made a mistake without that mistake becoming evidence that I’m a bad person.

That’s what being a 5 gives me: room for two things to be true.

I don’t have to prove I’m completely right, and I don’t have to collapse into believing I’m completely wrong. I can listen to what someone is saying and ask myself: Is there something here I can own? Could I have done this differently? Is there something I want to apologize for?

And none of those answers have to determine whether I am a good or bad person.

In that conversation with my friend, I finally stopped trying to move myself back to a 10. Enough time had passed that I didn’t remember every detail exactly the way she did, but I could accept that I may have done what she was describing and that it had hurt her. So instead of building my defense, I apologized.

And then we moved on.

That’s the part I’m learning: I don’t have to win the case for my own goodness every time I get something wrong. I can just be a human being who sometimes gets it wrong.

Being a 5 doesn’t make you less lovable

This is the much bigger lesson underneath all of it.

I think for a long time I believed, without consciously realizing it, that I had to be the 10 to be loved. I had to be the good friend, the good partner, the responsible one, the person who had her shit together. And if something threatened that image, I needed to explain, defend, justify or fix it as quickly as possible.

But that’s an impossible standard because eventually, the people closest to you are going to see the 5. They’re going to see you make a mistake. They’re going to be disappointed in you. They’re going to experience you differently than you intended to be experienced. And sometimes, they’re going to have a version of you in their mind that you don’t completely agree with.

That doesn’t mean you suddenly become a bad person.

You can take accountability for something you did without making it mean something about everything you are. You can acknowledge that someone’s feelings are valid without agreeing with every part of their interpretation. You can say, “I could have done that better,” without immediately following it with fifteen reasons why you’re still technically right.

And you can let someone be disappointed in you without making it your job to immediately change their mind.

That has been the biggest shift for me. When I stopped working so hard to prove I was a 10 and allowed myself to simply be a 5—a human being who sometimes gets it wrong—I didn’t feel less loved. I actually felt more loved.

Because I wasn’t requiring the people closest to me to love some perfectly defended version of me anymore. I was letting them love the person who sometimes screws up, sometimes gets defensive, sometimes has to apologize, and sometimes doesn’t get to control how she is perceived.

The thing I was trying so hard to hold onto—being loved, accepted, seen as good—was the exact thing I experienced more deeply when I finally stopped trying to control it.

Give yourself permission to be human

I keep coming back to that gate.

My body was bracing for an obstacle that wasn’t there anymore. And I think we do this emotionally all the time. We brace for rejection. We brace for someone being disappointed in us. We brace for what might happen if another person sees something in us that we would rather they didn’t see. Then we defend ourselves before we’ve even asked whether defense is necessary.

I’m still learning this. My body still braces. I still have moments where every part of me wants to jump in and explain why I’m right. But now I can catch myself and ask: Can I just be a 5 here?

Can I allow myself to be human? Can I listen without making this a referendum on whether I’m a good person? Can I take accountability for something I did without making it mean something about everything I am?

Because being human means sometimes you’re going to get it wrong. Sometimes someone you love will be disappointed in you. Sometimes people will have a version of you in their minds that you don’t completely agree with.

You don’t have to chase every one of those perceptions down and correct them. You don’t have to prove you’re a 10. You can be a 5, you can be human, and you can still be loved.

The freedom isn’t getting everybody to understand you and see you the way you want them to see you. The freedom is realizing you don’t have to do that—and you’re still lovable.

Before you go, consider this: Where are you trying to prove that you’re a 10 because you’re afraid of what it would mean to be seen as a 5? And what would change if you gave yourself permission to simply be human?

For more on this, listen to EP252 of the Create Your Fate podcast: Give Yourself Permission to Be Human.