Are You Waiting To Be Chosen?

“If you’re surrendering your uniqueness for acceptance, you are only existing and not living.”  – Erwin McManus

It’s a scorching hot day in Ocho Rios, Jamaica. July, 1990. The two captains were evaluating their options as they picked their teams for an impromptu game of beach volleyball. Each made their picks, and with the very last pick I was all one of the captains had left to choose from.

At my height I was quite surprised that neither captain saw the value I could bring to their team. I mean, height and volleyball usually work quite well together. I expected to be selected much sooner in the process, and with each pick that was made that wasn’t me the more annoyed and aggravated I became.

Unmet expectations often do that, don’t they? I mean, hell, I knew what I could bring to either team and when others didn’t have the same expectations for me I had for myself it really started to infuriate me. It was just a random beach volleyball game in the Caribbean, a perfect time to just chill and have some fun, yet instead of being happy I became anything but.

Nobody wants to be picked last. We all want to be chosen, to be seen and heard and appreciated, not to feel like someone’s only option. Being chosen brings with it a level of validation, a statement that we are, in fact, enough and we meet the criteria of those we often empower to validate us.

Our quest to be chosen by another can come at the expense of choosing ourselves. We humans can often abandon our truest and most authentic self in order to find a level of external validation to compensate for a lack of internal validation we are unable to give to ourselves. 

On that beach in Jamaica I was determined to have others see what they should have seen in me from the start. My inner competitive yet rather insecure animal showed up during that first game, and when it came time to pick teams for the second game I was the first one selected.

Vindicated and validated, all with an ice-cold Red Stripe beer in my hand. 

Or was I?

It wasn’t about winning the game. It was about winning their approval. Perhaps I did. But why did I feel I needed to do so in the first place?

Sometimes we become what we never intended to become in order to be chosen, to be picked, in order to feel a level of validation and emotional safety. And if we do find it we anxiously fear it is inevitably temporary based upon the inauthentic foundation such validation and safety were built upon. The high standards which once proudly defined who we are run the risk of being negotiated away in exchange for a sense of acceptance and belonging. 

Emotional chameleons we morph in to, selling off parts of our own authentic self, dimming our radiant light and quieting our powerful voice in the process. 

Choosing ourselves first can feel uncomfortable, unnatural, and even illogical, especially when we’ve been conditioned to seek validation and safety outside of ourselves. Trauma and experience greatly define our expectations, and in the unfolding of our lives we tend to experience what we expect to experience.

But the true emotional safety we all long for comes when we understand and accept that we not ever need to be chosen by others in order to be validated or find emotionally security no matter how uncomfortable the process is of letting go of the familiar mindset which has worked tirelessly to convince us otherwise. 

There is no switch to throw that will magically undo what’s already been done. But change always starts when our decision to change is meet with our willingness to start moving in a new unfamiliar, uncomfortable direction.

Baby steps forward are still steps forward. 

It’s not an easy transition, but meaningful growth is seldom easy. 

When we no longer anxiously spend time waiting to be chosen, we have far more time to choose ourselves. 

That’s the strongest foundation to build a most authentic life upon. 

Photo by Jannes Glas on Unsplash