Feeling Different is Your Superpower

I’ve felt different for as long as I could remember. From a young age, I can remember having a lot of thoughts, ideas, very big feelings and an even bigger voice. I was passionate, persistent and fearless when it came to my self-expression.

And then over time it all stopped. I bought into the lie that these parts of myself were unacceptable. I learned that it wasn’t always safe to be my truest self and so I gradually began to believe that it was easier to be invisible.

I stored all of these aspects of myself away so that I would never have to feel that sense of rejection again.

Swiss Psychologist, Carl Jung calls this our shadow. It's the part of us that we come to believe is unacceptable and so we decide it's safer to store away in our subconscious so that we no longer have to be with it.

Debbie Ford, one of my favorite Spiritual teachers says "What we can't be with wont let us be. Boy is this the truth.

We will try to fight off this part of ourselves, but this just creates more problems that will show up in all different parts of our lives. In my case, it affected every aspect of my life.

The truth is we need ALL parts of ourselves to feel whole and complete. It's no wonder we spend our lives chasing relationships to give us that whole and complete feeling. Most of us are searching for the parts of ourselves that we neglected in our relationships. And then we blame others for not being able to fulfill our own needs. We must be able to fulfill ourselves first before we can even possibly begin to know what we need to receive in others. The beautiful thing is that when we fulfill ourselves, we can choose our relationships more wisely and with the self assurance that we are worthy of having our needs met.

We can never really lose a part of ourselves. We can forget, however and life will keep showing up exactly as it needs to so that will hopefully awaken and remember.

My whole life is an example of this. I literally put my entire personality away in a closet. My passion, self expression, thoughts, ideas, creativity, humor and belief in myself. For many years I walked around feeling numb and at times questioning why I was even here.

It's no wonder I felt different.

And because it was too painful to not have access to these parts of myself, I went in search of them in all of my relationships. (That's for another day.)

So here is what I learned about feeling different that may offer you some insight. We feel this way because somewhere along the way we told ourselves a lie. We told ourselves that it's not safe to be all of who we are. Sending ourselves this message creates pain which is the catalyst for why we end up on a path to healing. But consider this, feeling different is necessary in order for us to “wake up” and begin to return back to our own truth. Consider that our painful experiences were exactly what we needed to cause us to feel different so that we can return to our authentic self. And part of accepting our whole self is being completely comfortable with the aspects of you that make you different.

The truth is we are all different. Those that don't feel different feel that way because they are more invested in believing that they are supposed to fit it. They never question thier own individual thoughts, ideas, beliefs, feeling, desires etc.

We are supposed to feel different. It is not an accident but rather the catalyst to opening us up to a path of continuous evolution and self understanding. Eventually we come to realize that the feeling of being different was a gift that continuously pulled us back towards our own individual truth. The struggle of feeling different is the very it needed to be in order reignite our internal fire that ultimately causes us to feel an intense desire to go out in the world and make a difference in only a way that we were born to. So if you resonate with this know that you are not alone. It is in awakening to your own unique self that you begin to see that you belong more than you know and are needed more than ever to bring your fullest potential to the party of this thing called life.