Facing Insecurity, Embracing Empathy

I believe one of the most helpful things we can do for ourselves and each other is get to know ourselves on a deep level, with compassion and curiosity. It’s not always easy, and often a messy and painful experience to face the parts of ourselves that we have hidden- and hidden from- out of a feeling of necessity and fear. Often, this process requires another mind- or community of minds- to help us.

I’m struck by the words of a former Marine* (on Veteran’s Day, no less) named Janae Marie Kroc. She is a white transgender woman, former Marine, and powerlifting world champion who has been public with her transition process, via Instagram and the documentary film Transformer. I was first introduced to her via the strengthlifting community while doing the Kroc row, a lift named after her, and have since followed her on Instagram and listened to her on many different podcast interviews. Currently, she is an advocate for genderfluid, nonbinary, and transgender folks, and still competing in strength sports. Today, she shared some thoughts via Instagram which got me thinking about identity, self, and how we hide from who we are out of fear, oppression, shame, and insecurity.

Janae wrote,

“I used to think “Why me?” I used to spend countless hours wondering why I was born transgender. Why couldn’t I just be “normal” like everyone else? I would wonder “why” about so many things that seemed out of my control and especially when it felt like I had gotten dealt an unfair hand. I felt depressed, defeated, and powerless.
”[Then] I realized I may not have been able to control what I was dealing with but I could always control how I reacted to it. I realized I wasn’t powerless and that my actions could always bring about some manner of change.
”I may not have been able to change the fact that I was trans but I changed how I viewed it. I realized it didn’t have to be a horrible thing. I realized there was a positive side to it. Even as difficult as it is at times I now truly feel fortunate to be trans, I am one of the few people that understands and has experienced all the best things about masculinity and femininity and I get to experience life from so many different points of view.” (@janaemariekroc on instagram)

Whether or not you are transgender or can identify with her specific journey, I suspect you may be able to dig deep inside yourself and touch on the parts of you or how you’re seen (or afraid of being seen!) in the world that bring up feelings like shame, fear, insecurity, and confusion. While there may be myriad reasons for you to feel this way, sometimes these feelings arise because we are feeling powerless about who we are, how we’re being understood or misconstrued, and how we do, or don’t, fit in to the expectations of our families or social environments.

Some of us have been taught to be ashamed of who we are if it doesn’t fit the mold or expectations of our surroundings. Sometimes, when we feel the most insecure we may be reacting to a mismatch between our internal feelings and the way our friends and family do or don’t recognize of the validity of those feelings. Sometimes, our social environments or our parents or siblings may have been too rigid, too afraid, too set in their own ways or projections to recognize us as different people. Sometimes, we may have had to hide behind something that isn’t fully true about ourselves (even if we wish it were true) in order to get the benefits of staying connected to others. Hiding ourselves from ourselves and others because we are afraid of rejection can cause tremendous pain, suffering, and confusion. Because most of us have needed to adapt to our environment in order to survive, if your environment wasn’t sufficiently adaptive to you, or didn’t provide a flexibly solid enough structure for you to grow into yourself, the part of you that is vulnerable might feel as though you have to hide in order to be loved or in order to get your basic needs met (or survive a police encounter, for example). This constant juggling act can make it hard to tell the difference between who you are and who you feel you have to be in the world, which is why it’s so important to feel empowered to create and relate to your own subjectivity and agency.

Psychoanalysis talks about split off parts of ourselves and how that can happen. Sometimes, when self-and-other (or self-and-internal experience) has felt too discordant, too intense, or confusing growing up, we can “split off” or separate out intolerable parts of ourselves. Sometimes we split these parts into categories of “good” and “bad,” though when then discordance is in traumatic proportions, it is possible to split parts of ourselves off into places we can’t even think about or are completely out of our consciousness. These split-off parts of ourselves tend to come out in subtle (or not so subtle) ways that require another mind (or community of minds) to help us think about and process our internal, subjective experience.

All this is to say that many of us are taught to, or think we have to, hide who we are from ourselves and the world, and for some of us that hiding is extremely painful and detrimental. It’s pretty common to think we want to change what we think are “bad” things about ourselves, but once we dig into why we think something is “bad,” we might find that that desire to change isn’t coming from where we thought it was coming from. Sometimes, change is about accepting who you are and then figuring out what, if anything, you wish to or are able to do with that information.

Janae says she has been able to live a full and complex life because she has learned to relate to herself and her situation differently, and was able to discover the places in her life where she could have agency and choice. This kind of self-compassion and self-reflection can be a model for many of us and can show us how to help transform our relationship with ourselves. As we grow, we may find that the people we once felt close to start to feel further away. While sometimes our community can grow with us, sometimes we may need to find new communities who are supportive and enthusiastic about who we are. Enduring the process of growth and transformation can be supported by others as we find recognition and resonance in other people.

Being willing to face and address the shame and insecurity we feel about ourselves can help us develop empathy for our own situation, and it can help us extend that empathy outwards towards other people who might also be bound up in societal expectations and oppressive power dynamics. Understanding what is happening inside ourselves and how that relates to our environment can help us have compassion and empathy for those times when we, and other people, don’t feel safe enough to take our “masks” off in different contexts. Prioritizing our own growth process can also help us understand the complex impacts of racism, genderism/sexism/heterosexism, ableism, classism, and settler-colonial impingements on individual and community psyches.

In essence: Our own growth through recognizing our own and others’ subjectivity can support our resilience, and can support resilient communities, too, even when faced with structural and sociopolitical inequities and oppressions.

Thank you, Janae, for speaking your truth and showing us the messy and the beautiful process of coming to know and love yourself. We can all learn from your vulnerability and power.

*I have heard that there is no such thing as a former Marine, but that is certainly not my call to make!

(Photo by Steve Halama on Unsplash)

this blog post is not intended to diagnose or prescribe treatment, and is not to be taken as a substitute for individual mental health care.