Have you ever noticed that some of the most confident-looking people, the ones who tend to be louder, more self-assured, or more on top of their lives than others, become the most insecure when they face failure or criticism?
I think I first noticed this when my oldest daughter was in nursery school. It was a small nursery in the basement of a church near our home with about a dozen children and one harried teacher. As parents we took turns helping out in pairs, so the poor woman didn’t have to run around with her hair on fire.
Because of everyone’s different schedules, I was often paired with a mother whose confidence, to be honest, made me feel smaller than I already felt. I had struggled with low self-worth for much of my life. Being next to someone who seemed to have their life together didn’t help; I not only felt inferior, I also felt inadequate. Needless to say, my inner critic loved her company.
Then one day, I saw a side of hers I wasn’t expecting. The teacher had planned a field trip to a new playground nearby with taller slides and larger play gyms. When we got there, all the children bolted off to the different structures as though they’d just been let loose from a cage. All but one. Her little boy. I’d known him for over two months now and I could see he was a shy kid who liked to take his time before trying new things. And once he found what he liked, his concentration knew no bounds. Even the intensity with which he ate the crackers he loved was worth watching!
The mother didn’t like his hesitation. She shouted from across the playground: “Go try the slide!” He glanced at it, then turned away and began digging the sand as though to make himself busy. I could see her facial expression change. She began muttering something under her breath, then almost as if carried by some inner demon, she marched up to him, picked him up by the hand, and lurched him onto the third rung of the ladder. “Climb!” she ordered. The poor child just stood there, frozen, a look of absolute terror on his face. The teacher saw it all unfold and came to his rescue.
When we returned to the nursery, the mother broke down in sobs. Her life was a mess, she said. Her husband was not ambitious. Her son was just like him. And she couldn’t take it. I didn’t quite know how to console her because even in her vulnerability, she was strangely resistant to being comforted. That was the last time I saw her. She changed her days on the roster. For a long time I blamed myself for not having been there for her. I now understand what happened: she had shown me a “weak” side of herself, and the shame had made her disappear.
This is what the fear of being regular looks like up close. At its heart is a feeling of being alone that likely developed early in life. When a child feels unimportant to her caregivers, either because they have little time for her, or because they are unable to meet her emotional needs, she hides the pain by deciding emotion is a weakness and cloaking herself in a garb of strength and self-sufficiency. She becomes afraid of being ordinary. Average. One of many. Unless she stands out, she tells herself, she will experience that pain again.
If some of this sounds familiar, I invite you to extend genuine compassion to the little child whose heart was shattered a long time ago. I know this will be difficult. Your mind may tell you compassion is weak. That you will fall behind or be seen as a loser or won’t be admired. After all, being strong, independent, and in control is something you value above all else, ideals that are further strengthened by the societies we live in.
But here’s the thing: compassion softens the heart. It makes it pliable, so that when it breaks, it breaks open and not apart. It makes it porous, so that your independence expands into the interdependence of relationships that lift as they rise. This is especially important for women because of our relational nature. We could have all the success in the world, but if it comes at the expense of relationships we value, we will suffer.
I’ve worked with many successful women who talk about the loneliness at the top, or in lives where there is no space for a relationship. They talk about the inability to be vulnerable, the fear of commitment, the pressure of finding the “right” person, or the heavy weight of estranged relationships.
Sometime back, I was working with a client who was desperate to rekindle her almost non-existent relationship with her adult children. She had recently sold a highly successful business that she had built from scratch, a genuine achievement, by any measure. But all she could talk about was the regrets of having missed her children’s childhood. “They don’t share anything with me now. I feel I have no place in their lives and it eats me up every day. I have completely failed as a mother.”
This black and white view of the world is stark in the fear of being regular. Life is like a see-saw, you’re either on top or you’re down on the ground. You’re either successful or you’re a failure. There is no space for being human: weak, imperfect, vulnerable. Because being human, you learned, means pain.
The good news is the pain can become the path to your biggest life if you find the place that exists alongside the pain. The place that has always existed, and will always exist. The place that reminds you that you are not alone. That you are held and supported. That needing others isn’t weakness but your deepest longing.
When you find a foothold in that deeper truth, something opens. You can relax. You can receive. You can allow yourself to be seen. And you can be received by others too, because empathy needs vulnerability.
This is the work we do on this Substack. Every season, we work through one of the deeper truths, what it is, how to find the one that lives beneath your particular fear, and how to nurture it until it becomes the ground you stand on. It’s the foundation of a power that doesn’t need to dominate to be real. If you aren’t subscribed already, I’d love for you to be. Because this work is worth doing. Not only for our own joy and flourishing, but for a world that is disillusioned by the old definitions of power.