Fearlessly Project Your Inner Light

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

Every day I ask my daughter if she has looked at herself in the mirror and told herself she is a strong and beautiful person, that she loves herself. I tell her that even when she feels weak, or ugly, or worthless, that if she can tell herself otherwise, even if just by rote, even if she doesn’t quite believe it yet, she can become the most powerful woman on earth. She doesn’t believe me yet. She thinks, even at age 7, that she needs to conform to an impossible standard of beauty and perfection imposed by the small universe around her. It crushes man-sized tear out of me to hear some of the things she says about herself, but I’m holding out for the long term win.

This quote from the 2006 movie Akeelah and the Bee, which I watched with my daughter, really moved me. It strikes a chord on a personal level, having struggled greatly to like the skinny geek I was in grade school. I was labeled a loser and a nerd quite early on in life– a description unwittingly aided by my utter lack of fashion sense and my love of computers, role-playing game rules, and lego.

Yet somehow, even through a considerable amount of self-loathing, I was stubborn enough to believe that I could turn the whole ship around. I worked at slowly shifting my self perception, not through delusion or false ego, but through persistent self-reflection and gradual acceptance. I sensed that if I wanted people to like me I needed to start with myself and work outward. I Every year, every day, I convinced myself that I was better than I thought, and every year I felt slightly more empowered. I moved forward and backward, at different rates and through a variety of joys and tragedies, but at the core I knew I could persist. And then suddenly, decades later, I no longer feet any negative residue toward my past self. As a matter of fact, I love that little me with the greasy bowl haircut and door-knocker knees.

So how do I instill that same stubbornness in my daughter? And in my son? And in everyone I meet, for that matter? I try to show them their potential. I get excited about the things they are excited about. I show them the value of passion. I encourage their whims and pursuits, and let them know that they mean something irreplaceable, unique and beautiful to me.

That is the real power of creativity: to embrace yourself and fearlessly project that inner light.