Category: Experience

Did I say I wanted to outdo myself in that last post? NO!!!!!! Delete, delete, delete! Granted, that is basically what I have been doing for 49 years now (as of next Tuesday… hint, hint), but enough is enough! Don’t you think? So this is a new one for me. I’m trying to turn over a new leaf here. That was a slip of the tongue. What can I say, old habits die hard.

What I meant to say was that I want to outbe myself. Being the greatest version of myself has little, if anything, to do with doing. It has nothing to do with accomplishments. It has nothing to do with achieving. Been there, done that. Not that I regret a moment of it. I think we kind of have to expend ourselves in order to fully realize our selves. Not to mention, truth be told, it’s been fun!

Seems we spend much of our lives working hard to lock in our identities. It’s a deeply human survival technique. You want to know who I am? Check the records. I’m legit. The records say so. Just look at my credentials. I have so many initials after my name that I have had to edit them! Ridiculous. You want to know what my records will show you? That I am a hopeless overachiever!

You want to know who I am? For that, you’ll have to get to know me. As in personally… through relationship. Now as you may have caught on by now, I am not easy to get to know. You’ve got to have some serious special agent tactical skills to navigate my defense mechanisms. I mean, come on, I AM an architect. I’ve got a well-designed (misguided as it may be) fortress inside! Expect a few bumps and bruises along the way.

Not that I am discouraging you. But how about this instead? How about I just make it easy on you? How about I just come out to play? That leads me to the first half of my new favorite word: outbe. In essence, outbeing is like coming out of the closet. Only in this case it’s a fortress, not a closet. Hello World, here I am! Here I am in all of my messy humanity. That’s the out part.

The be part is, well, gargantuan. That’s because when we really start to look at it, there is truly no limit to being. Oh sure, we draw boundaries around our being left, right, and center. But we are just making them up. When I say I want to be a better version of myself, what I am really saying is that I want to let down some of my arbitrary boundaries so that I can live into the much bigger Being that I Am. Put the two together, outbe, and what I am suggesting is stepping out into the light, outside of old, tired boundaries that no longer serve.

Go for it! I double dog dare you! Outbe yourself. 

Well that’s what she yelled as she sauntered by. “Shelly, you are a GOAT!” The very first thing that crossed my mind was, oh my God, did I forget to shave today?? Full disclosure… I have a goatee. Yep, sure do. See I was diagnosed with a “hormone imbalance” back when I was a teenager. I got tired of fighting it with drugs (by my early 20’s) and with various hair removal treatments (by my early 30’s) and never looked back. I decided that my hormones were perfectly balanced for me. That meant that I ultimately had to start shaving my chin. One of these days I am going to grow it out for all to see. Of course that will likely coincide with me retreating to our mountaintop tiny home, so maybe nobody will actually see me. But then again, maybe I’ll become known as the wise old mountain goat!

But that wasn’t what she was talking about, and really I knew that. I am an architect and a professor of architecture at a historically black university. The she in this tale is Nakia, one of my students. As she passed by I was discussing a detail with Shannon (my wife, a builder and our design-build specialist) and Rodrigo (another of my students) on the design-build project that my studio is working on. I looked at Shannon quizzically to see if she knew what she meant. Blank stare. I turned to Rodrigo for help. He shrugged. So I yelled after Nakia, “What does than mean?!” I had to know. 

I didn’t actually think that this would be scary, but it is. I love writing. It is easily the form of communication that I am most comfortable with. Various people throughout my life have reflected back to me that they love my writing too. Usually that has been in the context of a personal communication, as in one to one. I have long wanted to extend my (personal) writing to a larger audience, but doing so puts me face to face with what I have always dreaded most- vulnerability.

So I might as well start there. Vulnerability… just ugh. You mean you actually want me to open the gate, lower the draw bridge, put down my dukes, invite you in, and ultimately take down my walls? Are you crazy?! Do you have any idea what you are asking for?? I suppose that the people who know me best do know what they are asking for. But for those of you who do not know me, let this be your warning.

My role in life is to disrupt. What I tend to disrupt are the beliefs, thoughts, strategies, patterns, and so on that hold us back from reaching our full potential. This applies to myself first and foremost. I happen to have a lot of those. Traditionally speaking, all you have to do to launch me into a hard headed quest is to tell me something is impossible. I’ll be compelled to prove otherwise. The truth is that this has in large part been a hyper-survival mechanism. But beneath that is this undying belief that… we are much bigger than the walls that we have so carefully built might suggest.