The Elephant on the shelf

When I was at school, I made an elephant.

That sounds more impressive than it was. It was a metal elephant, made in metalwork, riveted legs and all. I'd love to tell you it was a masterpiece, but it was made by an awkward teenage boy who had never done any metalwork before in his life. Effort? Absolutely. Artistic talent? Debatable.

But my mum and dad put it on a shelf in the lounge anyway. And there it stood for thirty years or so.

Not because it was the finest metalwork elephant they'd ever seen, although how many they'd seen I couldn't tell you. It stayed there because I made it.

There is a Japanese idea called wabi sabi, and it comes close to this. It's the idea that beauty lives in what is imperfect and unfinished. Something made by hand carries the person who made it. A factory could turn out a thousand identical elephants, every one exactly right, and none of them would have lasted thirty years on that shelf.

• • • •

Why we keep measuring ourselves against the wrong thing

We understand this about the things we make. We find it much harder to believe about ourselves.

We live surrounded by finished, polished versions. The holiday photos. The announcements. The tidy houses and the people who seem to have it all sorted. Everyone's best angle, all day long. It's good to share these things of course.

But we hold our own unedited selves up against that. The odd habits. The enthusiasms that don't fit. The history, the doubts, the bits that would never make the photo. We look at the gap and decide we come up short. Everyone else is living a better life, I need to be more like them.

It isn't a fair contest. You know every uneven detail of your own life, and you're only ever shown the surface of everyone else's.

That habit doesn't come from nowhere. Somewhere in the early chapters, most of us learnt that some parts of us were welcome and others weren't. Be capable and you're approved of. Be difficult, or sad, or unsure, or just a bit too much of yourself, and you learn to turn it down. So, we sanded away the uneven parts and tried to look like everyone else.

It's like we have decided we should be machine-made instead of the wonderful quirky individuals we are.

• • • •

The elephant in the room

So those things about us that we hide away become an elephant in our own room. We know they exist, but we get nervous about sharing or admitting them.

Would people still love me if they knew the way my mind works? The things I find funny. The thing I love that nobody else seems to care about. The history I don't bring up. The regrets, the shame, the certificate you won as a kid that you're still proud of, the people you admire but could never tell, you get my drift. We spend a surprising amount of energy steering round certain things that we just keep locked up inside.

Now think about the people you love. It isn't their polished life you love, it isn't the Instagram ready selfie that you love, it isn't the new car they've just purchased that you love. It's the way one of them lights up about something nobody else would notice. It's the laugh you can pick out across a crowded room. It's the story they tell badly, every time, and you'd miss it if they stopped. It's the jokes that have to be explained to them, it's the care and sensitivity they show to others, it's the joy they find in the simplest of things, it's the drive, their passions, their ability to be fully present in a moment without a care in the world, it's their presence in your life.

The elephant in the room is very often the most you thing in it. It's the thing we hold back from showing the world, in fear that we wouldn't fit in, that it wouldn't be acceptable, and yet they are the very things we love in others.

So often in British culture when someone asks how you are, we respond with "I'm fine", even when we aren't really. Even people who are grieving offer it as their first answer. A tidy, polite reply that closes the subject before we become too vulnerable.

We learn to tone ourselves down before we walk into the room.

• • • •

I spent decades hiding the unpolished version of myself, believing it wasn't acceptable to others, or that somehow by saying what I really felt people would run a mile. After a while, that constant pursuit of trying to fit in feels like we have no real sense of who we are anymore. And yet we want people to see us, don't we? We long to be accepted for who we really are.

And people really do want to see the real you too.

When we finally let a few people see the whole of us, they don't leave. If anything, they come closer. What we have been smoothing over turns out to be the part they most want to know.

• • • •

There's a children's book from 1922 that understood this better than most grown-up ones. In The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams, a new toy rabbit asks the old Skin Horse in the nursery what it means to be Real.

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

And then he tells the Rabbit what it costs.

"Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

Shabby, loose in the joints, a bit worn at the edges. That's not what stops us being loved. Very often, it's the evidence that we have been loved.

Striving to be perfect in the world's eyes is never where real beauty is. Real beauty is in being true to yourself. All of yourself, and everything you love.

• • • •

How to start being the real you

So how do we start living that way?

• Reflect. Notice who you measure yourself against, and whose idea of a good life you've been quietly adopting. Ask yourself when you first learned which parts of you were acceptable, and who decided. And ask what you love that you've stopped admitting to.

• Release. Put down the comparing. It can start small. Saying you're not sure instead of producing an answer. Telling a friend the week was harder than you let on. Admitting out loud to the thing you're a bit obsessed with. Leaving the house as it is when someone drops round. The parts of you that don't match were never the problem. Holding yourself against everyone else was.

You might worry that accepting yourself as you are means giving up on changing. The psychologist Carl Rogers found the opposite. "The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change." Growth doesn't start from sanding yourself down. It starts from being honest about what's there.

• Reclaim. Build more of your life around who you actually are and what you actually love. Let yourself be known. Not by everyone, and not all at once. One person, one room, one honest moment where you don't tidy anything up first. See what happens when you trust that the real you is enough.

• • • •

You were never meant to be machine-made.

That elephant didn't stay on the shelf for thirty years because it was perfect. It was something loved for who it was, rather than how polished it was. Rivets and all.

The parts you've been sanding away are not flaws. They're how people know it's you.

So what's the elephant in your room?

Put it on the shelf. It's who you really are.