Guest feature: Letting go of balloons

By Casey Manes

Maybe it was reaching my 30th birthday, or maybe it has been becoming a parent for the first time, but either way, I have become aware of becoming old.

It’s not just about finding a second gray hair or finding myself saying mom-ish, old lady things like: my back hurts from sleeping on a new bed or feeling carsick after looking at a map for two seconds. It is more like I am turning old at heart by becoming way too much of a rule follower.

You know the ones: following rules with a legalistic bent, forgetting to laugh, fixating on how people perceive you or how to look or please certain people.

So I am on a quest to unlearn some rules in order to make sure I am becoming truly, entirely, messily, wonderfully the person God intended, while staying young at heart.

Anne Lamott, a writer I revere, said, “The real issue is how do we gently stop being who we aren’t? How do we relieve ourselves of the false fronts of people-pleasing and affectation, the obsessive need for power and security, the backpack of old pain and rules?”

Here’s how I stop being what I am not: failure, admitting my fears, silence, dancing, listening to loud music, lots of Jane Austen, heartbreak, hours of reading, laughing hysterically, being a bit dorky, loss, risk, staring off into space and out windows, and long, deep talks with old, trusted women friends.

When I was a kid, I loved playing dress up. Sometimes, so much that I would convince my mom to let me stay in costume for outings to public places. So I would traipse along in a dress that had me resembling Laura Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie, with 10 crooked barrettes askew all over my hair, complete with tennis shoes and loose laces slapping loudly as I walked.

In those moments, I wasn’t trying to become someone I wasn’t; I believed I was donning an outfit that made me more of who I already was. Which, at the time, was apparently a souped-up version of a pioneer girl. But you get the point. I wasn’t afraid of what others thought, I felt good as myself.

For me, returning to this sort of innocent, fierce desire to stop being who I think others want me to be and to embrace my authenticity takes a full, dead stop. To do this, I began to consciously break the rules I began learning through growing up.

Here is what I am not doing.

I am not trying to achieve more, faster, harder. I am not trying to grasp and hold more. I am not looking at what anyone else is doing and trying to emanate them. These are formulas I have followed for way too long. I am not reading any books on how do more, better.

Here is what I am doing.

I am daydreaming more, moving slowly, wasting time, and eating more chocolate. I am saying “no,” and I am making things with my own two hands and getting lost in the project. I am removing my watch and letting go of the things I hold onto too tightly sometimes. Oh, and when I am in the midst of being with someone, I am trying to actually listen, instead of thinking of what I want to say next.

Lamott also said, “The only problem is that there is also so much other stuff, typically fixations with how people perceive us, and how to get more of the things that we think will make us happy. You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren't. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don't think your way into becoming yourself. Obviously, it is in many people's best interest for you not to find yourself, but it is better for you, for the whole world, to proceed.”

Recently, while at the grocery store with my one-year-old, an employee was handing out free balloons. Glossy, pink, blue and green balloons bobbed from shiny ribbon, just begging someone to give that helium a chance to fly. My daughter had never held her own balloon before, and her eyes grew wide with excitement as I tied the ribbon to her wrist. With several kids dotting the store that packed afternoon, inevitably, several balloons were already stuck to the ceiling.

Honestly though?

All I wanted to do was let that balloon fly high, too. Only kids-who-don’t-know-any-better do that, right? But I get it. It’s a feeling of carefree fun letting it go and watching it dance into the heights of the sky, or, um, in this case, grocery store ceiling.

I resisted that day, for my daughter’s sake, but it’s a lesson I’m taking with me on this thirty-something quest to keep my heart malleable and open, not tired and dried up. Maybe being thirty and being a mom don’t have to make me feel old, after all.

I plan on being a letter-goer of balloons, so to speak, while trusting God with the journey back to the person He made me to be.

Casey Manes is a writer in Olivet’s Office of Marketing Communications.