Be your magnificent self.
That’s the tagline I chose for my newest middle grade book, The First Magnificent Summer, which releases this month.
Be your magnificent self.
It’s a great message, isn’t it? Especially for kids. I hope every kid in the universe knows they’re magnificent. Just because they’re themselves.
But I know not every kid does.
I’m one of them.
That’s not a typo. I didn’t mean to say I was one of them. I still am one of them. I know I’m not a kid. But the kid who failed to believe she was magnificent, who filtered most of her life through the lens of “I’m not good enough, I will never be good enough,” still lives in me. She’s a big part of me. I’ve only just begun the work of assuring her she was always magnificent. Assurance and deep-down belief are miles away from each other, and it is hard work crossing the chasm.
In a recent therapy session, I told my therapist that I’m tired of feeling like no matter what I do or achieve in my life, it’s still not enough. I told her it made me uncomfortable to have a reporter come into my home and ask me questions and write a story because it left me so exposed and known. And I told her when I’m exposed and known my anxiety and depression and OCD explode into action.
“Why do you think that is?” She said.
“Because I know if people get too close to me, they’ll see my darkest parts,” I said.
“And what happens then?” she said.
“They’ll leave me.”
And there it was: the crux of the problem.
When I was eleven years old, my parents divorced. My dad left entirely. From what I remember, we had only spotty contact for the first two years, a couple of summers when he took us to Ohio, and then he dropped off the face of the planet. He didn’t come to my high school graduation, where I delivered my valedictorian speech; or my college graduation, where I walked with honor cords around my neck; or my wedding or the births of my children.
Nearly my whole life was spent under the shadow of his leaving, looking through the lens of “I must have done something to drive him away. To keep him away.”
Who knows you better than your parents, when you’re a kid?
Be your magnificent self? My “magnificent self” had driven away one of the most important people in my life. My “magnificent self” was too much—too emotional, too anxious, too extra, too everything, too whiny, too sarcastic, too loud, too silent, too in love with writing. I needed to be someone different.
I wrote about this in The First Magnificent Summer. I wrote about the small hurts and the big ones. I wrote about the breaking in two. I wrote about disappointments and dreams and everything between the two.
I wrote a better ending.
And thought I was done.
“Be your magnificent self,” I wrote in the author’s note. “You deserve to be loved just because you’re you.”
And still I couldn’t fully believe it, as evidenced by the discomfort and terror of attention.
“You wrote all your hopes into the book,” my therapist said. “And now you need to absorb them as your truth, like you hope the kids who read it do.”
They’re wise words.
So the first thing I say to the 12-year-old girl in me every morning is “You are magnificent.”
Because she has to believe that first.
Recently I came across something the Indian scholar and activist Manabi Bandyopadhyay said: “Be yourself, the world will adjust.”
But the truth is, the world doesn’t always adjust. Dads don’t always come back home or say they’re sorry. Friends don’t always admit they were vicious and jealous and it had nothing to do with you (and also everything to do with you). The people in our lives don’t always accept our neurodiversities or quirks.
But if the whole world doesn’t adjust, that doesn’t mean we have to. It just means we may have to adjust our expectations—and maybe stop looking for our worth and acceptance in other people.
I believe 12-year-old Rachel was magnificent. I wish she had believed it all those years ago.
But I think we’re getting somewhere now.
I know this was a hugely personal email. But I hope you’ve found some value in it and that it helps you remember that we are all deserving of love (it deserves repeating) just because we’re us.
Have a magnificent month of being your magnificent self.
Strategies to help you believe in your magnificent self:
1. Draw a scale
Whenever I talk about how I feel like a bad mom, my therapist encourages me to create a scale from “best mom” to “worst mom ever.” On the top is the mom who never yells or gets frustrated or wishes she could have a break from her kids (I’m not her). On the bottom is the most neglectful, spiteful, unkind mother I can imagine (which I’m also not). I fall somewhere in the middle, which instead of labeling “enough” I’ve named “magnificent.” Do the same for whatever you’re struggling with—parent, friend, employee, human being. My guess is you’ll fall somewhere in the middle, too, which is magnificent.
2. The word cloud
Grab a piece of paper. Write your name in the middle and circle it. Now create a word cloud for all the things that make you you. (Mine would have things like, loves to write, finds life in reading, hates clutter, needs space, doesn’t like loud noises, enjoys sarcasm, dislikes talking about Minecraft endlessly, prefers staying home, etc.) At the bottom of the page, write the sentence, “I am magnificent, because…” and finish the sentence. Hang the paper where you can see it or put it in a safe place where you can refer to it easily.
3. Seek therapy
Sometimes it takes a licensed therapist to peel away layers of misbeliefs we’ve had since we were kids. I know we’re pressed for time and money (and honestly I think mental health care should be free for all), but this is important work. And we never regret the important work of healing.
