Who I Want to Be, Who I am

And learning to love the gap between them.

I believe we all have an aspirational version of self.

For me, that is a Jesie that cooks each meal at home, made from ingredients I’ve grown in my garden, or bought from a local market, and I also have dried herbs everywhere, and I know what mixture of them will ease your ailments. This version of Jesie is effortlessly calm, a little witchy, and makes her own soap. She also drinks herbal tea from her locally sourced pottery and reads heady poetry. She hosts beautiful and abundant dinner parties, with seasonally curated menus. She paints and spends most of her free time frolicking through the woods, she is never out of breath while hiking, and mosquitoes never bite her. She also has 12 dogs, but her house still smells like fresh linen.

But Real Jesie makes sure there is some Trader Joe’s pizza in the freezer, is happy to run by McDonalds for nuggets, and takes “mucus relief medication” bought in bulk from Costco for 6 months out of the year. She doesn’t really paint, has a stack of “started” books on the nightstand, and watches reruns of beloved shows before bed instead of reading any of those books. She does lose her breath, despite living in Colorado her whole life, and mosquitos are shown a picture of her when they are born and told “This. This is a Michelin-star meal for us. Find her, bite her, indulge in the best meal of your life.” (I am working on the 12 dogs though. Very actively. And if anyone wants to sign a petition convincing Michael and Jeffrey of the nobility of this endeavor, please comment below.)

That aspirational self is lovely, but so am I. And the truth is that I actually live my life somewhere in between the two. More often than not, I think we are dancing around in the gap between the aspirational self and the current self.

Maybe your aspirational self is fitter than your current self. I get it, I can relate. Maybe the aspirational self is less depressed, less anxious, or has no mental health struggles at all! Maybe, that self is imperfect, but in a perfectly curated way. The messy bun that you redo 14 times before casually leaving the house. And maybe that aspirational self is scrubbed entirely of who you really are or what you really want to offer.

I am learning to love the gap between myself and my aspirational self, in part, because the striving and effort to be as effortless as my aspirational self pretends to be….just isn’t it for me. I also had what I call a “punch you in the chest session” with my own therapist recently. She doesn’t really punch me in the chest, obviously, but sometimes her truths do. I shared with her about how I “don’t really want to give more” to a few situations in my life, but how “not giving more makes me feel like I’m not generous, or I’m unwilling” and she said (this is the punch in the chest:) “It’s okay to give only what you want to give, and to let the people who want more from you than you want to give to sit with their own feelings about that and figure it out. And, it’s not right to give what you don’t want to give because it will breed resentment.” Well, pardon me while I shift my whole paradigm of relationships.

When I first started writing this piece, before that therapy session, I was going to end it this way: “So I’m deciding to allow this aspirational self to serve as kind of a vision board of how it could look, or to represent the things I value, but not to be a destination I hope to reach.”

And, while that’s a lovely thought, I don’t actually believe it anymore. I am not going to create an “aspirational self.” I am actually going to let my aspiration be to embody the most honest and wholehearted version of myself. And that version of myself knows the nobility of her own “No.”

So I invite you to join me in this chest-punching idea that we can give and be what we want. And that maybe we can learn to love the gap between the current Self and the version of us that is fully embodied, fully honest, fully aligned, and steady in our offerings. And, of utmost importance, we can trust those around us to navigate their own reactions to us.

What do you want to reconsider about the aspirational self you may have been pursuing?