Insignificant Things: Shedding

The skin I feel comfortable in is starting to shed and I'm not sure whether to grab hold of it, or shrug it off my shoulders.

Hidden behind the facade this 30 something year old has crawled behind, is the wide-eyed, world-exploring, deep-breathing, word-forming being I was meant to be. She’s just buried under the skin of pretense, shame, fear, and self-imposed perfectionism. She's worried to be set free because she’s too vulnerable underneath.

But there is this chafing, this discomfort between this soul and this false self skin I have been living in. I always thought if I worked hard enough, proved myself long enough, that this skin would feel like my own. Maybe, just maybe it would fit like a glove.

Yet the One keeps slowing me down enough, forcing me to cease striving and revisit this growing irritation. Oh yes, there it is, this skin is shedding and I cannot pretend any longer. It doesn’t fit me. It doesn’t define me. It is not the real me. It is wearing thin, threadbare and encumbering me from life abundant.

I want to rub it all off. I want to leave it behind but I feel so raw beneath it, vulnerable to the elements. Like skin not yet calloused, from pressure and friction, I am vulnerable. What will it feel like to release this shedding skin? Will I feel exposed, unaccepted, unloveable? Naked?

This shedding is an ugly thing to behold. In one hand I grip tight to pretense, while the other drags dead skin behind in flying folds, waving in the wind. In one hand my grip is tightening and in the other, it is slipping.

Some pieces are stuck so tight that I am simply unable to pull them off without help.

The unveiling of who I am underneath is both my undoing and my becoming, and therein lies the tension.

Yet I have been known, underneath, all along. I have been seen, behind the sheen, since behind the closed doors of my mothers’ womb. I have been stitched together and formed under the careful supervision of a master maker, no part undecided, no part undetermined. The fear that holds me back is just a lie. Because the One who knows my name, the One who numbers my hairs, already accepts the me He made.

I work on letting go of the skin in my grip and watch it float away on the wind, flitting and flailing about in the breeze. I watch the One who loves me, whisper my true name, and with His breath the last bits of old skin blow. With just one puff of air from His lips, it is released. Just as He formed me with a breath, He is reforming me.

Another layer, shedding.