Permission to Be Misunderstood

Following your convictions even when those around you don't support or understand it, and how that might result in a serious ugly cry

Photo by Dev Asangbam on Unsplash

Learning to let go of other people’s expectations for you is one giant trust fall. I’ve discovered that you really can’t do it unless you have a solid foundation. Coaches on the internet will tell you, “you’re going to need Teflon skin because you’ll never please them all” which is true, but the other truth is that no matter how thick your skin is, there are still some people in your life that have the ability to cut, even the thickest skin, with their expectations of you.

Within the last year, I had one of the most gut-wrenching, hard conversations with a close mentor of mine that I’ve ever had.

I got a text saying, “Have a few minutes to chat?”

And after building in ministry together for years, this was not an abnormal text to receive, so naturally I was like ‘yes of course!’ I literally thought nothing of it. She called to “touch base” about some things, so I answered of course not expecting anything other than we’d cover some logistics of loose ends of a few projects we’ve been working on before summer break hit, and that would be it.

This is a woman whom I ADORE and respect with everything in me. She has seen me, and called me UP, in ways I never felt qualified for until she called them out in me. She was one of the few I would say, handing out permission slips to me in a season of little kids, where I was drowning in chains of “shoulds” and “I can’ts”. She has created more than one space where I was welcomed, all of me, never once shying away from the all-of-me parts I was afraid to verbalize out loud in other spaces. She’s always been a safe space and a human that I admire.

This call tore that la-la land of safety in half.

Turns out, even those in your life – the safest of them all – can have expectations of you, or parameters for you, that maybe don’t match the path which you know God has you on. I’ll spare you the details of the conversation, because truly they don’t matter, what matters was how I was left feeling after our conversation.