Standing In Your Own Power: Why You Don't Need to Be Anyone Else's Version of Strong
I have a "hype running" playlist I use at the gym — all the tunes that make me run faster than any podcast or book ever could. Songs I've heard a zillion times… but every so often, Spotify (the evil genius that it is) throws in a curveball.
Yesterday I was happily belting out Believer by Imagine Dragons — all-time classic, elite hype energy — when Slim Shady popped up. Not surprising; my phone is clearly listening to me. Plus, I'd been enjoying Eminem's lyrical genius earlier in the week, while my coach rapped every single word, which I found genuinely impressive.
Fun fact: I learned the entire rap from No Diggity (thanks to Pitch Perfect, obviously) and can still perform it on demand… even if you don't ask. (You won't. But I might anyway. 😂)
Anyway — one line in Without Me stopped me in my tracks. It’s a line I have heard countless times, today, it landed. He's talking about how there'll always be other people doing what he does, but there will only ever be one of him.
I've heard that line a hundred times, but this time it hit different.
“There’s a concept that works
Twenty million other white rappers emerge
But no matter how many fish in the sea
It’d be so empty without me”
To me, this is what "standing in your own power" looks like. It isn't about needing to be the best. He isn't saying that at all. My take? He's simply saying, "I'm me."
It isn't about needing to be the best. He isn't saying that at all. My take? He's simply saying, "I'm me."
There might be twenty million other white rappers — no shade to any of them — but there will only ever be one Eminem. Why? Because he's not trying to be anyone else. He's fully in his "Marshallness."
The shoe analogy
Have you ever borrowed someone else's shoes for a night out or a special event? I definitely have. And no matter what, even if they're the same size, they never feel quite right. They feel a little weird, maybe uncomfortable, they definitely don’t feel like your shoes. Anyone who has fallen in love with a pair of shoes that just don’t fit (sale shoppers, I see you) hasn’t cut parts of their foot off to get them on. (Did you know: in the original Cinderella, the Ugly Sisters literally sliced their feet to fit into the glass slipper. Dark, right?)
When you get a new pair of shoes, you "wear them in," letting them mould to your feet. My runners know exactly what I'm talking about — try doing a 10k in box-fresh trainers, welcome to Blisterville and inexplicable ankle pain that you didn’t have before
Living in your own power is like wearing in your own shoes. Letting yourself fully be, rather than cutting off parts of who you are to squeeze into someone else's expectations.
Mic drop
I have playlists for my classes. As you'd imagine, they're unconventional — a bit of Zen, some Imagine Dragons, some Kenny Rogers, Panic! At The Disco, even a bit of Bring Me The Horizon. Disney tunes, naturally, and some beautiful piano pieces for my sacred savasana.
Imagine I'd decided to stop playing my playlists because I saw a "serious" yoga teacher online — speaking only in Sanskrit, wind chime in hand, perfect serene aesthetic. So I ditch the playlist, buy a tiny triangle to ding now and then, stop making up silly names for poses when I blank (because, let's be honest, I'm human), and basically try to embody that "perfect" yoga teacher persona.
Guess what? I'd feel weird. My crew would feel weird. The energy would drop.
I'm not a stand-on-a-mountain teacher. I'm singing through class, telling crazy stories, talking about ice cream, changing the flow because I can see someone in the room has an injury they didn't feel able to share. Almost every class, I add something in because I felt a sensation in my own body that needed company. Sometimes I feel something and want to explore it a bit deeper, so the flow goes a different direction. Trying to be "perfect" would mean losing connection to my body — my ultimate compass in class. That intuitive sense of when to push, when to slow down, when to crack a joke because the vibe needs it, when to get excited and hype my crew because they're nailing the move I set them, in their own wonderfully beautiful way. If I'm busy performing someone else's version of perfect, I can't tune into what actually makes me, me.
Would I feel accomplished at the end of class? Doubtful. I'd feel depleted, and like my feet were bleeding (thanks, Ugly Sister shoe analogy).
So… how do you start?
How do you "be more you" when you've been practicing being someone else for so long?
I can only tell you how I did it. I had been hiding. As a child, a lot of fingers were pointed at me for the way I looked — by parents, doctors, kids at school. It made me deeply self-conscious. I had speech therapy because my voice sounded different and I couldn't say certain words. I had operations, and the after-care that went with them. I was scared to be myself because I'd been told, over and over, that I sounded funny and didn't look right. So I hid. I made everyone around me feel better instead. I didn't even know I was doing it.
I have a scar on my lip — a proper lightning bolt, like Harry Potter. I was reading the Throne of Glass series by Sarah J. Maas. The heroic protagonist, Aelin has battled through life. She has scars that she won along the way. After a pretty harrowing ordeal she is attended by a healer who, in the process of fixing numerous broken bones and sealing truly horrific wounds they also remove the scars she had accumulated during her lifetime. When she wakes up, she notices her body is perfectly unblemished. Sounds great. She hates it. On first read, that didn’t make any sense to me. Why would she be upset that those ugly scars had been corrected?
I sat with this thought for a while. I asked myself: if I could have my scar removed, would I? I really wanted the answer to be yes. I have turned my head when pictures were taken to make it less obvious. I have rubbed potions and lotions on it in the hope that it would fade. I have kept my head down on the street to avoid notice. The answer to the question of ‘would I wish it gone’ seemed incredibly obvious. And yet it wasn't. I couldn't imagine giving up that part of me — a part I'd spent my whole life being ashamed of. The moment I realised I didn't want the scar gone, I held my head up. I'm proud of the struggle I went through. I wouldn't wish it on anyone else — but you all have your own version. Those struggles made me, me. Yours make you, you.
With that new perspective, I started letting myself be a weird, Disney-loving, jiujitsu-obsessed, gym-loving Queen — and tapping into the gentler side of me too, the side that's blown away by dragonflies and plays like a kid whenever possible. And I felt better. Lighter.
But every time you let yourself be truly seen, you realise something magical: you are wonderfully, beautifully special.
You only get one of these lives. Don't spend it wearing someone else's shoes.
If this landed, you don't have to do anything with it right now except notice. But if you want more of this kind of thinking in your inbox every fortnight, A Letter from the Trail is where I go deeper — why not join the mailing list.
