Embracing Human Frailty

I have a confession. I don’t think I’m becoming a better version of myself.

There, I’ve said it.

We are constantly encouraged to become better versions of ourselves. Better mothers, daughters, partners, leaders, friends, and women. More organised, more confident, more successful, more disciplined, more healed and, if Instagram is to be believed, better dressed.

But what if I don’t want to become a better version of myself? What if I want to become a truer one?

A truer version might be less impressive. She gets tired, makes questionable decisions, and occasionally discovers that somethings she thought was dealt with years ago is still sitting uncomfortably inside her. Sometimes, she simply needs to sit down and admit, “I don’t know why?”

This space is for The Woman I’m Becoming, not The Woman I Have Become, The Woman I Should Be or heaven forbid, The Perfect Woman.

Becoming isn’t always about adding something to ourselves. Sometimes, it’s about dropping the performance. The need to be liked, validated, to be right or that automatic “I am fine” when we are anything but.

Today’s article is about embracing human frailty; I am not referring to ageing or the physical changes that come with it. But frailty of the mind and emotions: our doubts, fears, contradictions, and vulnerabilities. The parts we struggle to explain, let alone love. The uncertainty that exists alongside faith, sadness that coexists with joy, complaints that brews alongside gratitude, and the fears that sometimes peeks at courage.

These are not weaknesses nor exclusive to any age group. It’s simply, parts of being human.

Frailty has a rather bad reputation. We admire women who carry everything: work, family, responsibilities, and everyone else’s feelings, all while turning up with a smile on Monday morning. She is dependable, capable, and rarely asks for help.

But we are not machines. We can love someone and still hurt them. We can have faith and still have questions. We can be successful and feel like impostors on certain days. We can be grateful for our lives and still have a thoroughly rotten day.

Strength and tears can occupy the same person and they often do.

Perhaps we need to stop treating vulnerability as something that must be hidden away before anyone notices. There is nothing shameful about having limits or admitting that we struggle, despite our lives appearing perfectly fine on the outside.

Speaking of being fine, I suspect those three little words deserve a closer look.

“How are you?”

“I am fine.”

It may be one of the most efficient little lies in the English language.

My apologies to burst that bubble, fine often time means more than meets the eye, it can mean exhaustion, it can mean reeking in pain and unable to explain it. Sometimes, a plea not to poke and probe, that “if I start talking, I might cry”, and often a silent prayer, “I really don’t have the energy to deal with this in public”.

We all have a polished version of ourselves, like a well rehearsed script, the successful version, happy version, productive version. We walk about our day, like one who appears to have everything under control, if photographed, it will look sunny, thanks to filters and good lighting.

Then there is the real version. The woman who sits in her car for ten minutes before going inside. The woman who cries in the shower. The woman who is still upset about something that happened twenty years ago. The woman who occasionally wonders, “Why me?”

She may not photograph particularly well, but she is real.

This is not a declaration of war on social media. Reels can be fun, useful, and even honest. Sometimes a shared thought, a laugh or a practical tip can help many of us get through the day. Occasionally, a reel reflects us more clearly than an elaborate makeover ever could.

The trouble begins when we mistake an edited glimpse for the whole story. We see everyone else’s highlights and compare them with our unfinished, untidy, very human lives. Before long, we begin to wonder how everyone else seems to have figured it all out while we are still fumbling through the instruction manual.

Perhaps there isn’t one.

Through childhood programming, many of us learnt that being strong meant upholding the family reputation or following in the line of strong brave ancestors before us. Thus, holding up that legacy, we learnt to hide our wounded or broken wing, constantly projecting positivity, and gratitude with grace.

But not every painful experience needs to become a life lesson by Tuesday.

Just a lazy lunch, an extra hour of sleep, a hug or someone who will sit beside us without immediately trying to fix us can work wonders. Not every sadness needs a strategy. Not every disappointment needs a silver lining, before we are permitted to feel the pain setbacks bring.

Dependable is defined as one who says yes, shows up, solves problems, and remembers what everyone needs. It is admirable, until it becomes an expectation, we are afraid to challenge.

Somewhere along the way, being dependable can become being permanently available.

A thought we don’t entertain let alone question, is why do we say yes when we mean no? Could it be the desire to be liked. Or the fear that people will leave if we disappoint them. Or could it be that external validation feels safer than facing our true selves in the mirror.

We make ourselves indispensable, then resent being needed for what we can bring to the table than for who we are. That’s the contradiction.

Validation decked in the clothes of dependability.

Boundaries were never merely rules established for others. But invisible rules we impose on ourselves to continue being useful, accommodating, and to keep giving until there is barely anything left of ourselves.

And should we muster the strength to say no, guilt arrives uninvited, making us question ourselves with a silent yet growing concern of what others will think.

But quite frankly, kindness and boundaries are not opposites. We can love without rescuing, care without carrying and say no without being cruel.

We can be generous without becoming responsible for everyone else’s happiness. We can be loved without becoming a genie who makes everything happen to stay valued.

I must admit as I say this, I too am still learning this myself, a day at a time.

This is where the real work begins: learning where our responsibility ends and another person’s begins. The courage of giving without abandoning ourselves in the process.

It’s shocking the key eye for detail we have when it comes to maintenance about everything around us except towards ourselves.

When was the last time we gave ourselves permission to pause without feeling guilty? To rest without having to justify it? To acknowledge that we have reached our limit without treating it as a personal failure?

The emails can wait. The laundry will survive. And more often than we imagine, people will survive too.

Life, of course, has a habit of changing the script without consulting us. People leave, others arrive, jobs end, dreams do not materialise, parents grow older, and relationships and priorities change. Sometimes life simply moves the furniture around, and we find ourselves stumbling over things that used to be exactly where we left them.

Human frailty also reveals itself in those moments when we realise we do not control everything. Truthfully, we never did.

For a long time, we believed that if we planned carefully enough, worked hard enough, loved deeply enough, or prayed fervently, we could protect ourselves from every disappointment.

Then life happens and it dawns on us; the truth of change.

I don’t have a beautiful answer for everything anymore. There’s a certain freedom in saying, “I don’t know.” It isn’t defeat. It’s an honest place to begin.

Perhaps all these experiences and changes lead us to recognising that there is a divine flow and plan. 

Which is why, we are not our worst day.

A failure is not a complete account of who we are and nor is success. A wrong decision is not a permanent verdict, nor is a right one, the coronation of Ms. Know It All.

Success and failure are just moments in the bigger, messier, occasionally ridiculous, and ultimately wonderful business of being alive.

We are flawed, complicated and capable of making a spectacular mess of things. And within the same frame, we are also capable of learning, growing, and trying again despite the odds.

Learning to hold ourselves accountable is needed for growth than punishing ourselves indefinitely from things we have outgrown. One allows us to learn. The other keeps us trapped in the person we were but are not today.

Beginning again is lesser of an opportunity to reinvent ourselves and more about realignment.

For me, this means paying attention to the person I am becoming rather than spending all my energy trying to maintain the image of the person everyone expects me to be. I cheer for change without an announcement and lessons learnt to move on, without the drama.

I don’t know exactly who I am becoming. Perhaps that is the beauty of it.

I hope I am becoming wiser, braver about saying no and less interested in looking as though I have everything together. I hope I learn to laugh at myself more often, as would be a shame to spend an entire lifetime trying to look flawless and miss the sheer absurdity of being human.

The more “I don’t want this” choices we make, surprisingly, heralds a shift. No more saying yes when the gut screams no. Embracing our frailty shows us our strength unused yet very much present, craving to be unleashed. That is when the performing a version of self leaves making room for woman we are becoming.

Visualise this, after years of being married to “YES”, the eternal people-pleaser, “NO” finally files for divorce and emancipates herself. Haha…

And honestly? It’s about time!

It may take a while for us to get acquainted with “NO.” It may feel awkward at first, and we might occasionally be tempted to return to our old patterns. But on the sunny side, this could be the best decision taken to stay true to self.

To conclude this article, frailty is neither a defect we must hide nor a badge we need to wear. It is the truth that we have limits, get things wrong, need rest and reassurance, and most definitely each one of us needs a second chance.

Embracing human frailty gives us a softer view on growth, making room for the whole person, the whole package; petals, and thorns.

Perhaps the woman I am becoming is not someone entirely different from the woman I have been. She is simply learning to be more honest with herself, more compassionate towards others and a little less frightened of being seen as imperfect.

What might change, if, instead of trying so hard to appear perfect, we embraced the blooming rose, just as she is, with a clear instruction, “no gift wrap needed.”