The first week of my Woman-istry month with team SMACK! (Sarah, Meredith, Abby, Chelsea, and Katrina) has probably been one of the coolest weeks of my Race so far. I’ve loved getting to spend time with different people on my squad and to learn from them and in all honesty, I’ve felt more like myself with these four women than I have I have in a long time. It has been really awesome to get to spend time with new people who I’m comfortable with but they have no preconceived notions of who I am or what I’m like so they don’t have me inside of a box of how they expect me to be or act or react or anything.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my regular team and they are some of my closest friends, but because they have been with me since the beginning of the Race, they have an idea in their head of who Abby Borland is and how she acts and what she’s like that they have been formulating since January. They’ve seen me grow in so many ways over the past 7 months, but they also sometimes see me through the lens of who I started as and not always who I am presently.
That’s not something I would have thought was such a bad thing before this week because I would actually see it as a really great thing, to have people around me who know how I act and what I’m good at and what I like, but it turns out that it doesn’t always benefit the person who’s “known” so well. Something my new teammate, Meredith, asked me was, “Do you ever get tired of being known as the sweet, nice girl all the time?” And it’s not something I had ever really given much thought to before this week, but yeah, I actually hate that my “identifier” is that I’m “sweet” or “nice.” I’m not a candy bar or an unexpected bag of M&Ms, I’m a real person who has more to offer than being sweet. That’s an identifier that a lot of people would assume isn’t such a bad thing, but it gets really tiring to not be a real person all the time.
Being know as sweet makes me feel like that’s how I always have to act and it also means that other people think it’s not ok for me to have feelings that aren’t happy and rainbows all the time. I have bad days. I have times that it’s really hard for me to see the happy in things. I struggle to always have a smile on my face because I feel like that’s my job; I have to be the sweet, smiling girl that makes everyone’s day better just by being sweet and nice. That’s not who I want to be all the time. Being with a new group of people has made me remember that it’s ok for me to step outside of the box of who people expect me to be. It’s ok for me to want to be in charge of ministry for a day, it’s ok for me to want to talk about a hard topic during team time, it’s ok for me to not want to clean the dishes, it’s ok to want things my way every so often, it’s ok. I don’t’ have to let everyone else shine at the expense of me being shoved into the background going unnoticed. I don’t have to do all of the unwanted tasks just to be nice. I don’t have to pretend that life is all rainbows and butterflies. I don’t have to let people walk all over me for them to like me. I can be a real person and still be loved by my team and my squad. I don’t have to be a candy bar.
