Dear friends,
I don’t know about you, but I need all the help I can get battling the Main Character Syndrome trope often explained or displayed on social media lately.
I don’t want to step on any toes, but I’m pretty sure there’s a part of each of us, even the most humble and introverted among us, who trods the boards of this life with an imagined spotlight, uttering our lines and hoping for an audience response. How do I know I do this? Because my husband’s simple antidote to MCS (even though he wouldn’t have used that term) is so foreign to how I walk into a room. He suggested this greeting as a posture for every encounter:
“There you are!”
Instead of:
“Here I am!”
Brilliant, right? And equally difficult, at least for me. As someone whose mind and body lean toward activity, simply breathing, remembering, and deciding to change a fundamental, long-imbedded trait, this isn’t easily done.
And so, how do I change? Still working on answers to that question, but I can offer one life hack that’s helped me (along with learning to breathe, remember, and decide to change): Live out change in ways that fit you. Because you are you, and that’s a good thing!
The ultra kinetic suggestion I’m about to make may not seem like a life hack, but for me, it is. One of the first events Refuge hosted–back in 2015 when we were mere zygote with no truck and no baristas yet–was a 5k. It was an experimental oofering of welcome and community that has become a tradition in, well, in welcome and community. So, I suggest the following exercise in practicing “There you are!”:
Come to our Run for Courageous Welcome.
If you don’t run, come walk. Bring your kids for both of the free races. If those options aren’t available to you, volunteer. Or sign up to do it all!
If you show up, I predict that someone will say, in so many words, “There you are!”, giving you all the “Here I am!” feels…. But you’ll have scads of opportunities to redirect your enthusiasm to others, which—at least in part—is what welcome is all about!
I’ll see you there!
Kitti
P.S. – Video below of our second run in 2016… we had a truck, but no shop yet!
