I stood with my friend in her kitchen. After several months of hearing her talk in circles about every person and scenario that did not go her way, finally I was hearing something different.

When I had met her, she was light-hearted, silly and unattached to the outcome of her pursuits.

Child-like and free.

I had always been impressed by her. She had an idea, tried it, and was usually somewhat successful. Her small business this time last year had boomed. People were drawn to what she was offering. I had not had the same luck. Or maybe I just couldn’t see it if I did.

Now, at 6PM, I was finding out that she had had a difficult day. She smiled as she delivered the recap. Not one complaint, or use of the word ‘motherfucker’. It was a nice change from receiving the information fresh and filled with emotion, which at times felt like an energetic assault to those she was speaking about.

The contrast between her current demeanor and that of the past two months was great. This felt like peace, while before was a safe sinking to the depths of the ocean — heavy, without remittance.

“When the customer service reps were telling me what I didn’t want to hear, I told them they had a hole in their dinghy or that their pilot light must have gone out instead of getting upset at them.”

She laughed her hyena laugh and threw her head back. She was having fun. This was the girl I had met several months back. The grumpy gargoyle that had replaced her for the last two must have cracked open and crumbled since our last conversation.

“I thought I should just go back to the way things were before all of the bullshit. Things were going better then.”

My friend had had a difficult few months. Her family had been busy criticizing her and rejecting who she had become (a cross between a golden retriever and an elephant), and it had taken a toll (she was a fighting fish before). Like many of us, it was easier to conform to their expectations than to hold strong as herself against the threat of complete rejection, pain and solitude. It was safer.

If we’ve allowed it, the version that everyone expects us to be is far more miserable, unsuccessful and small than who we really are. Something too different and new is a threat to comfort, mistaken as a threat to survival and if the pack doesn’t want to change, you can leave, conform, or be yourself anyway. Most of us choose one of the first two.

Watching my friend conform and lose her spark was painful at times. It was hypocritical to perceive it as painful because I had done the same in my own life. At some point I determined that it wasn’t safe to be, and I started guessing what I should be instead. As a result, I ended up lying inadvertently to everyone around me, and was left with relationships and a life that didn’t match. Everything became incoherent. I too had become a grumpy gargoyle. The interference between fabricated me and real me was too great, and then I got sick.

I had mountains to undo to find who I was before ‘all of the bullshit’, and well, the excavating team is still working. But as I have worked on it, and come closer to myself, everything has improved. I feel more at peace. Life is more like an opportunity than like having a hind leg clamped in an inescapable trap.

When I first met her, everything was working like magic. Now, it seemed like something went wrong at every turn. No matter what she did, something always got in her way.

Think about how you feel when you’re happiest? Are you acting like yourself or as people expect you to act? Who are you being when things are just going your way? And when they aren’t?

I think the ‘magic’ of life lies within you and with you. It’s there when you’re being yourself, and when you learn how to be yourself, you become strong too. You can stay seated in yourself, even when ‘you’ threaten others’ comfort. You’ve seen, felt, experienced the benefit and the challenge in learning to allow others to be themselves, and you wouldn’t rob others of the same gift by catering to them. When you’re you, things just work out.

The next day my friend sent me a message —

Well, taking Mondays off must be a thing. Business was so dead last week, but today it was steady.

Of course. It wasn’t the day off. The age of serfdom was ending and she had returned to her own kingdom.