authenticity Archives - Gina Brenna Butz

Stop Telling Me to be Amazing

Post author:Gina B
Post published:January 31, 2015
Post category:expectations grace identity

Be Amazing

I saw a shirt at Old Navy once that said, “Be Amazing.”

It felt like way too much pressure. And that’s coming from an Enneagram 3. My husband says 3s are driven by “the need to be awesome.”

It might have felt that way because I was in the middle of power Christmas shopping that should have been spread out reasonably over 5 days, but had been crammed into one due to sickness.

That same sickness forced me to bow out of a speaking engagement and left my house a bit of a disaster (pro tip: if you keep wearing shoes in the house, you don’t feel all the stuff you haven’t swept off the floors). I was just proud to be upright and not in yoga pants.

It felt like that again later, on day 15 of my husband’s 16 day trip around the world (Lord, have mercy) when I was just happy that I was awake and communicative without the help of legal stimulants. We only ate 2 frozen pizzas and a deli chicken. This I call victory.

What the World Tells Us

It seems everywhere we look, we’re being told we can do it.

We can be amazing, and awesome, and over the top sparkling, beautiful, jaw-dropping.

Ordinary is for suckers. Lazy people. Those who don’t really care, who don’t want their lives to count. I shouldn’t just survive when my husband travels; I should thrive.

And we have our moments – all of us do. We have shining moments when we reflect the glory of God. We have red-letter days, it’s true.

But living there? Gosh, it’s exhausting. And truthfully, I don’t think it’s what the world needs.

What the world needs is not more amazing.

What the World Needs

The world needs people who are living and loving faithfully, authentically, with hope and perseverance and grace. People who have shining moments and messy moments and are ok with all of them. This is what our souls need too – we need the freedom to be who we are.

The world needs people who get up each day and choose to live the ordinary moments with trust that even this is significant.

We need people who accept who they are, with all their good and bad, beautiful and messy, all together. People who believe it’s all worth offering, and then offer it.

We were created for great works, but also for ordinary ones.

Sometimes we will amaze and other times we won’t. There’s nothing wrong with not being incredible at every moment. It’s called being human.

So please. Stop telling me to be amazing. Tell me just to be me, and I will gladly oblige.

Being Human

Can We Be Both?

Being Human

Post author:Gina B
Post published:May 8, 2013
Post category:courage grace identity

So I’m in this women’s group about shame. Yep, shame. Sounds fun right? And not at all awkward.

We’re talking about it because it’s the topic of a book we’re reading by Brené Brown, and if you don’t know who she is you should go find out. Wow. Just wow.

The book we’re reading is called I Thought it was Just Me (But it Isn’t). It’s about recognizing shame and building shame resilience.

Shame is the fear of disconnection. It is the feeling that there is something about us that is wrong, and that wrongness separates us from others. It sends us into hiding.

What I keep coming back to as we talk about this topic is that so much shame comes from the fact that we all have a hard time just being human. Shame outright sucker punches us when we buy into the messages all around us about what we should be, what we should do, what we should have.

The expectations are huge and conflicting and impossible, but we try with everything we have to meet them so that we don’t have to feel like we’re the ones left out. Shame tells us that it’s not ok to just be who we are, to be human.

I have a friend who says we all vacillate between believing that we are superhuman or subhuman. When we’re superhuman, we think we can do it all, that if we try just a little harder we can achieve that ideal. We refuse to accept that we have needs or limits.

Or we decide we can’t do it, we’re not good enough, we’re less than, and we put ourselves in the subhuman category. We vote ourselves off the island. Either way it’s shame at work.

I’m realizing through this group that shame doesn’t have to win.

We can all just be our imperfect, struggling, up and down, awesome and less than awesome selves. But to do that, we have to take a hard look at those expectations. We have to stop listening to them. But more than that – we need to talk about what they do to us.

We’ve been doing that in this group, because the cure for shame is empathy. We share our stories and we listen and try to enter in and say “you’re not alone.” At times it feels awkward and uncomfortable, because we want so much to do it well, but more and more it brings the greatest sense of relief and acceptance. It’s a joy to be able to say, “This is me being human” and to have others say, “Yeah, I’m human too.”

Why can’t we all just be human?