Merging the Great Divide

It’s December 29, the last official weekday of winter break for the kids. The kids all have friends sleeping over and they’re up in their rooms, playing games and giggling together. While I sit and listen to the chatter upstairs, I’m thinking about New Years; resolutions to be exact.

With a hot cup of coffee next to me, I’m gazing down at the bigger themes of my goals for this year. They are centered around the success of our family, business and band. And they all have a lot riding on achieving them.

The things is, these goals all seem to rely on partnership. In my life, partnership is key. I have business partners, I have a marriage and music partner, I partner with musicians, teachers, speech therapists, parents, my ex-husband, bands, venues, promoters, city council members and other businesses, and in every-day-social-contexts, I partner with you. We all live inside a partnership context, whether we know it or not; whether we are upholding our end of the social partnership contract or not.

And in my partnerships, my personality seems to tiptoe this line between “Jen has a strong personality, is confident, and will be direct” and “Jen is sweet, hard-working and rooting for you.” While this may seem really yin & yang of me, actually both of these descriptions are true. I will tell you, in honor of your emotional intelligence and our closeness, how I feel and what I need. I am a perfectionist and hard on myself, always working towards improving. I like to work and am not afraid of doing the shit no one else wants to do. But I also am caring and encouraging. I try to look strangers in the eye and smile at them. I practice giving easy and true compliments, letting the things I love about the people around me roll off my lips like a waterfall. I skip down the street hand-in-hand with my daughter and roll around my neighborhood in an adult-sized scooter talking in bad British accents with my son. I laugh easy and cry even easier.

I am all of these things, and sometimes it feels like the world doesn’t want to let me be both. And I’ve been thinking about this, how to reconcile these two sides of me. Do I need to choose sides?

And then I had an epiphany. There are not two sides of me. There is only one. There is just me. I am all of those things and that’s what defines me. If people only like one side of the coin, they don’t like the coin, and that’s ok. I quite possibly don’t fit into any easy boxes, any simple categories. And I shouldn’t, right? None of us should.

It made me wonder if this is another one of those lies of society that makes us think that people, women in particular, need to decide what their “identity” is - am I the hard-lined business woman that takes zero shit from anyone, or am I the sweet mom who makes you cookies and tucks you in at night? Am I allowed to be fully Jen, even if Jen doesn’t fit into one of those categories (or possibly could fit into both)?

An amazing friend and counselor of mine once told me, "TRUST the epiphany, Jen - not the doubts that follow the epiphany."

So, this year, I want to stop keeping these two parts of my personality compartmentalized. I want to let them merge and become one. They need each other after all. The direct side of me needs the patient and fun-loving side, and the fun-loving side needs the directness of setting boundaries of the other side.

And ultimately, more than ever, I need to be ok with people not being ok with this. This is hard, but the weird and strange truth is there are people that don’t want you to find your truth and they especially don't want you to live into it.

I'll never understand that weird and strange truth, because after all, who wants surface relationships? I’m in my mid-30s and now that I’m here, it’s harder than ever to talk about the weather, or fashion, or television. It’s hard for me to talk about things that don’t matter to me. With the world as polarized as it is, we need to find safety in our relationships and allow ourselves to discuss things that are hard without it possibly detonating the entire relationships. In a reality where we are all tip-toeing on proverbial broken glass, this might be the only solution for us to move forward as a society.

And this approach has cost me some relationships - and while that was incredibly painful, it also ended up being very okay. In the end, I had to let myself be ok with saying goodbye to fragile relationships to make space for ones that can be sturdy, mature, and withstand the hard moments while fully relaxing into the good moments. I want honest friendships and partnerships, so I’m ok saying goodbye to ones that cherish ease over depth.

Looking out at 2018, it’s hard to think what the year has in store. Big things, I guess, if I look at my goal list. I know that none of us really have time tip-toeing around the things we know are true and what we need from each other if we want to get anything real and valuable done. So, I’m fully letting go of fear and holding onto love tighter than ever before. If love is truly the answer, 2018 is the year that I'm going to see that answer more than ever. And I’m ready hear from the people around me too - hear their truths and their needs. I'm ready for next level relationships and partnerships. Let's level up together, shall we? 😘

Rooting for you, as always! XOXO

Jen Deale

Boss Lady, Camp Crush // SBP Smoothies // Bailey & Cooper