How easy is it to 'just be yourself’? 💌

Notes on being Jen, not Jenny.

‘Have fun. Just be yourself,’ Dad said as he got back into the car without me. 

We’d unloaded box after box of my stuff into my humble university bedroom - my new home for the next year. I was 18, and soon to find out I was the youngest person in my halls. Most people were at least a year older, if not more, and were arriving with tales from beaches in Thailand and sailing boats in the Mediterranean. Not out of the norm, I’d chosen to go straight to university from college.

As I nervously waved my dad’s car away, left standing hundreds of miles from the much smaller world I had known up until that point, he took the last two letters of my name with him. The car faded from view, I turned and walked into registration and instinctively introduced myself as Jen, not Jenny.

It’s worth clarifying here for the avoidance of doubt that Jenny, not Jennifer, is my full name. My male friends at college had started to call me Jen the previous year, and I recall having an instant affinity to how friendly and open she sounded. I had tried her on for a while, and I liked her. Starting university felt so big and huge and adult; Little Jenny simply didn’t belong there. Jen felt more like me. So in an instant, as I entered the registration hall and embarked on that huge new chapter, I became Jen, not Jenny, the undergraduate English student.

Jen would very soon start writing her first blog, which is weird to think about as I sit here typing some 19 years later. That day Jen, not Jenny, introduced herself to a wave of new faces in our shared kitchen - the first nervous seeds of friendships that thankfully have also stood the test of time. Jen was so excited, so READY to get going. I didn’t know anything about the world, but I knew I was sociable and would make friends, and I knew a little about who I thought I was in the context of my life to that point. It had led me to choose the non-vocational subject of study, and it had led me to choose the bubble of a campus university.

But as it turns out, neither of those things suited me. Pretending to be a grown up had always helped me to move forward, and in fact, to become more myself. From my chronic illness diagnosis at eight, to getting my first job at 14, to my quite frankly irritating talent for getting every teacher on side - Jenny’s favourite thing was being called ‘mature’ by adults. However my particular brand of athletic campus university in many ways encouraged the opposite - from living in hoodies and sweatpants as standard, to the animalistic drinking chants that echoed across the student union.

This wasn’t unusual for universities at the time, nor was it necessarily terrible in and of itself. I was delighted to get completely swept up in it all, but without the balance of a strong connection to the real world to remind me that it was all so silly and unimportant, along with an untreated hormone inbalance, some difficult stuff going on at home and a chronic illness I was failing to manage, Jen didn’t flourish at all - quite the opposite. Despite those generous, wonderful friendships, the happy blur of questionable fancy dress, endless free time and countless nights out celebrating everything from birthdays to Tuesdays, I emerged three years later with a degree to my (Jenny’s) name, but absolutely no idea what it meant to ‘just be yourself’. It’s clear looking back that as I moved through my undergrad, I had spent increasing amounts of that time trying - and of course failing - to be anyone else but me. 

‘Just be yourself’ was and is really sound advice. But we are so often signalled to look outside of ourselves in order to form our identity, or perhaps more critically, to form FEELINGS towards who we perceive ourselves to be. I absorbed it all, from TV to teachers to magazines to my peers, and a result the idea of ‘just being myself’ became something to actively avoid. That poor girl!

Now, at 37 and thankfully a long way from the chanting, I feel very differently. But I’ve been reminded of young Jenny often since I moved to Spain alone last year. I have been repeatedly forced to practise ‘just being me’ on a very conscious level as I introduce myself again and again, putting myself out there to meet new people and build community here. Ironically, ‘Jen’ literally doesn’t translate in Spanish, so I’ve said ‘Jenny’ more times in the last 6 months than I have in the 19 years since Jenny was sent packing back to my hometown in Dad’s car.

Right now it’s not uncommon for me to introduce myself anew multiple times a week, and with it who I (perceive) I am as I talk about my life and what’s brought me to Barcelona. Over and over I present a version of myself, consciously selecting in realtime which parts to articulate and which parts to omit. Am I the wide-eyed, joyful Jen in this situation, or the discerning, journalist Jen? Am I introverted or extroverted today? Am I the deep-thinking Jen or the facetious, giggly Jen in this context? Do I tell you my age and my nationality and stop there, or are we going deeper? 

Thankfully I now have a very clear sense of self, which is a beautiful thing to acknowledge whenever I think about that 18-year-old. But starting all over again in a new country has been a very clear reminder that ‘just being yourself’ is no simple thing.

Perhaps the most important part, I think, is that this repeated selecting, this presenting of who I am now only happens on my terms and according to my own definition - not in response to how I would like someone else to perceive me. 

Of course I occasionally let doubt or influence creep in, because the desire to be liked is entirely human. It can be hard to catch that of yourself - to realise you’re subconsciously telling yourself that you don’t belong, or that you should dress or act a certain way to conform or to meet someone’s approval, or that you shouldn’t be in the room at all.

But once you’ve taken the time to understand or simply to grow into what it means to be you, being yourself really IS the flex. It IS the magic that makes you, you, and we all deserve to take up space in that truth, with the knowledge that your opinion of yourself in any given situation is the one that truly matters.

I’ve been forced into that space again and again through travelling the world, then moving here. Through meeting new clients, going on dates, finding new running and hiking buddies, learning a new language. I’m consciously building a life in what is another huge new chapter, but this time it’s based on who I have become and want to become, not on who I let others tell me to be.

And I’m still a work in progress, just like all of us. But do I know that I trust myself. I know that I’m continuing to shape myself through these experiences. I too know that there are parts of myself that I’m still yet to meet, which is rather exciting, actually. And unlike student Jen, not Jenny, I unequivocally know that just being myself - whether it’s Jen or Jenny - is something to embrace, not to escape.