Insecurity

[sidenote: I have switched to a new blogging platform if you're wondering why things look so different]

I'm about to get real with all of you. Over the past few years as I've struggled with illness and depression, identity crisis, and a million other issues of life – I've learned that the best way to heal is to be vulnerable. I have tried to be vulnerable throughout my healing process from depression and illness but there is one thing that I have yet to get vulnerable about. Today is the day that I'm going to take that leap. This has been a long time coming and this topic is one that God has placed heavily on my heart over the past few months. I have spent hours upon hours with God struggling through this issue, this thing that needs to be resolved. And we are not yet there, but I'm working each day to conquer the weight of these chains.

I n s e c u r i t y : uncertainty or anxiety about oneself; lack of confidence.

Insecurity looms over all of us in one way or another. I don't know a single person on this earth that hasn't felt insecure at some point in their life, let alone at some point in each day. And here's where I get really real and admit it out in the open: I struggle every day with confining, imprisoning, crushing insecurities. Sometimes these are insecurities over the most trivial of things – like the way I sound when I laugh, the fear of someone judging me for my acne, insecurity over being just who I am because I was told for years that who I was wasn't good enough. These insecurities, this self-doubt, has stemmed from years of believing what other's had to say about me. No matter how many likes you receive on instagram when you post selfie, how many comments stating how beautiful you are, how cute you look, how fashionable you are – there is still the lingering doubt and insecurity that longs for affirmation. But we're never going to find it by looking to the world to fill us.

For a very long time I let the people around me determine who I was going to be. I can vividly remember at the age of eleven realizing that I wasn't pretty like the other seemingly perfect young girls in my class. Already, I was comparing myself. I wasn't blonde enough, my hair wasn't straight enough, I didn't have the same cool clothing, my teeth weren't perfect enough, my eyebrows weren't thin enough, and my body just wasn't right. It hurts me to write these words because when I see these young girls now who are struggling with their image, at such a young age, I just want to grab them by the shoulders and tell them,

“You are miraculous. You are undeniably beautiful. You look exactly the way God wanted you to look. He dreamed you up and made you into this beautiful person. He LOVES you so incredibly much. You are not defined by the comments of other people. You are only defined by God.”

How I wish this was ingrained into my mind at the age of eleven when the bullying began and the insecurities set in. I spent the better part of four years striving for acceptance of my peers – my time in junior high was painful and exhausting. These painful moments stick with us and shape us until we bring them out into the open and turn to God for healing. I wasn't able to do this for a very long time. When I was twelve, we had a dance between two schools in my community and my friends and I were so excited to meet all the boys from the other school. We all wanted to have our first slow dance with a a cute new boy. We were so naive and enthralled with the idea of even being near a boy – let alone dancing with him under twinkly lights. That night, the cutest boy at the dance asked me to dance with him. I was over the moon excited. I blushed and giggled, and barely said a word as we awkwardly swayed at an arms-length distance on the dance floor. As soon as the song was over, I ran back to my group of waiting friends and told them all about it. But just a few minutes later, I overheard this boy and his friends laughing and talking about how funny it was that he asked “the ugly one” to dance. I can still feel the jolt of shock and overwhelming insecurity I felt in that moment. To think one moment that this boy thought I was cute and pretty, but to realize that it was a cruel joke and I was the target of it. I went home in tears that night and refused to tell my parents what had happened. This became a theme over the next couple of years.

At such a young and vulnerable age, where we are just starting to find out who we are and trying to find out where we belong, we are surrounded by a million little things that can crush our self image. At age twelve, I already felt like I wasn't good enough. So I waxed my eyebrows, cut my hair, meticulously straightened my hair every morning, lined my eyes with the blackest eyeliner I could find, piled on the mascara, bought tighter jeans, got a real bra, and went to the orthodontist to “fix” my smile. All because I wanted to be liked. I wanted to feel good enough.

I remember one day after talking to my mom about the boy from the dance and how mean he was (who by the way continued to bully me for a solid five years until my older brother threatened to rip off his nut sack and feed it to him) and she told me something that changed my perspective a little. It helped me to get over the need for approval, what she said to me was this, “Someone else's opinion of you doesn't define who you are.” This has stuck with me for the rest of my life. I realized that I had spent my whole junior high experience trying to measure up to this image of perfection just so I would be liked by people who didn't even truly know who I was. This finally gave me the confidence to be me. I stopped hiding behind the makeup and the straightened hair, the tight jeans and the shimmery lip-gloss and I started being me. Going to summer camp helped me immensely in learning who I was. It gave me the confidence to just be me and be accepted for who I was. A huge part of this was the amazing cabin leader's I had, the friends that I made, but mostly it was learning about God and his love for me. I think this foundation is what made me a “camp girl” from there on out. I spent all my high-school summers working at camp and loving every minute of it. The more time I spent at camp, the more “me” I became. Finding my best friend at youth group also helped with this. Surrounding yourself with people who love and accept you for just who you are is so important to knowing your worth and value.

Obviously now, as I'm writing this, I've already stated that insecurity is something that I still struggle with – so clearly, something has changed since my high-school days. One thing I have learned is that when you live in a way that is true to yourself, some people won't like it. Not everyone is going to like you, and trying to impress them isn't going to help you any. I spent way too much time trying to fit in with certain people and be friends with certain girls who always made me feel like I wasn't cool enough. I hung out around people who made me feel like the annoying little sister, people who kept me around because I was a good listener and I was a loyal friend, but would easily push me aside when someone cooler came along. For this reason, I have a hard time making friends, even now. These experiences made me feel that I wouldn't ever be someone's first choice. When the insecurities became more about who I was and less about my appearance, the way I coped was to be a little less “me”. In the process of doing this, I lost myself in a lot of ways. In some ways, I'm just starting to find myself again.

If you've followed my blog, or have known me over the past few years, you'll likely know that I went through a time where I was really sick. Now, the illness I had put me through emotional hell if I'm being completely honest, but one thing I haven't touched on from that journey is the insecurities that arose out of it. Physically, I liked who I was before I got sick. I was content with my weight, my body, and my overall appearance. During the time that I was sick, I couldn't care less about my appearance. A lot that was depression and the fact that I barely left my house and spent most of my time in bed. And now, post-sickness, I am left with a ton of physical insecurities. My body is different from how it used to be. My skin is different. I look different. And that's not a bad thing, but it's something that has caused me a great deal of insecurity.

There is also a whole other side of this insecurity this time around, which is – I know that my worth is in Christ. I know that I am fully known, and still loved. I know that I am accepted by Christ and that is all that truly matters. But that doesn't mean I feel happy with the body I'm living in 100% of the time, which in turns makes me feel guilty. I feel guilty for not being happy with the body God so graciously gave to me. The body that fought through an illness that could have killed me. I should be grateful for this body. But more often than not, I spend my time hating it.

This past June, someone who I have come to admire and love so dearly, shared some things that God had shown her about me (She has an incredible gift of prophecy). One of the things she said to me was that God would be taking me into a season that would be a little heavy and intense. That he would work out heart issues and hurts, and my inward response to situations. It wouldn't feel nice at times (like heart surgery) but in the end it would bring more freedom than I have ever known. -- Upon hearing this, I got a little frantic at first. I didn't want to dig deep or feel any more hurt when I was finally feeling happy again. But I also wanted so desperately to experience that freedom in Christ. I wanted him to work on me and use me for his kingdom's work. I made a decision in that moment to go all in with God. I sat on my bed and poured my heart out to the Lord in prayer. I asked him to show me the things in my life that were holding me back from fully living for Him and from living in freedom. And he showed me so quickly I thought maybe I was imagining it.

Your insecurity is holding you back.

I thought, how can that be? My insecurities have nothing to do with my relationship with God and nothing to do with me sharing God's love. But I was completely wrong. I decided to set aside one week to specifically pursue God and seek his guidance regarding what he had shown me. I took one week away from everything that wasn't God focused. I only listened to worship music, I listened to sermons before bed instead of watching netflix or youtube videos, I spent every spare moment I had reading the bible and praying over everything that came to mind. I sought out God passionately and excitedly. Something I learned during this week was that sometimes God will ask us to give something up, and when this happens we shouldn't be upset or scared, but instead, we should be over the moon excited; because when God asks us to give something up, it means that He is bringing us into something new, something better than we could have imagined for ourselves.

By the end of this week I was able to see how my insecurities were holding me back from living fully for God. Because of the insecurity I felt physically, I didn't want to be social, I so often hid out in my apartment and only talked with people who already knew me and who I felt comfortable with because I was afraid of what people would think of me. I didn't want to be judged. I was afraid and shy, too scared to be myself, and because of this – how could I preach to other's that they are loved and accepted by Christ if I wasn't even able to live in that truth myself? And thus started the transformation that is happening now, and likely will continue to happen for the rest of my days.

I promised myself and I promised God that I was going to live in obedience to Him, and that I would recognize and remind myself daily of where my value is found. Since then, my life has been a whirlwind of change and growth. I have quit my old job where I felt unappreciated and undervalued, I made a decision to take a massive pay-cut in order to serve up at a camp for the summer, which ended up bringing me a huge blessing of a full-time salaried job with benefits and accommodation in an incredible ministry-oriented community, I have been encouraged to be me again, to be myself completely. I have been able to step out in confidence in who God created me to be, knowing that I still have a lot to learn, but that I can be used greatly by God when I share my story and when I live in his truth and freedom every day. My insecurities are not a thing of the past, but God is fully there in my present and his truth is the only thing that can overcome the weight of my insecurity; so I choose to fill my mind with His word and to praise Him every single day, especially in the moments when I feel self-doubt creeping in. Through this, I have experienced God working through me more than I have ever seen in the past. He has used me to speak truth into the live's of others who are struggling with some of the same hurts that I have struggled through. He has used me to share my story, my testimony, to encourage people to not give up hope. I cannot wait to see how he continues to mold me into the woman he designed me to be. I am letting go of the pressure I had placed on myself to force myself into a mold of the world's design. I am living by God's design and for His purposes.

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life — your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

- Romans 12: 1-2 (The Message)