Being vs. Presenting

My internship supervisor and I have spent the last three weeks talking about my difficulty being myself vs. presenting myself.  In some ways (and maybe I'll talk about the reasons for this later) I feel like I'm trying to perform, to present myself.  All questions of forcing something that should come organically, aside...

One way it came up (again) was as I finally figured out something about the question she asks me every week: "What's next?  What else do you want / need?  Where do you need to grow?"

They are really good, really important, necessary questions.  I'm glad she asks.  But I sat and started to realize that you can hear those questions in one of two ways.  The first way is to say that "you are a failure, there is something missing, you lack something, you're messed up somehow so how do you need to fix it now?"  The second is to hear "Yes, you are wonderful and beautiful but how are you still blossoming and becoming something even more beautiful?"

I was hearing the first set of questions.  It was grating on me to hear them every week.  I come back again to Mindset, making me think about how I've been trying to probe my identity over and over again and been really afraid of failure instead of taking each interaction as it is and using everything as a learning, growing experience.

Anyway, part of it is that I'm so cautious in social settings (in some ways!).  I try to figure out the spirit of a group before I let myself really show into it.  In seminary, issues of political correctness swirled around a few hot-button soapbox issues; I rarely, if ever, let my real feelings on those issues out into the open (if, indeed, I knew exactly what they were).  Similarly, when I was telling a friend in college I had gotten into Yale she was flabbergasted: "You got into Yale?!?!?!?!"  Maybe she was impressed, but it felt to me as though she clearly didn't believe that I was being honest, that I really had.

I'd be willing to bet that it surprises / surprised many people I was headed to seminary at all.  I don't know that, outside a few who pushed me towards it, people saw me / I acted like a person who was serious about going into ministry.  Other than playing roles in ministry settings, did I have the personality / habits of a minister?

I said to my supervisor that I keep the things that really excite me, my passions, under wraps most of the time.  If they don't happen to come up, I don't let them out.  If people don't ask me the right questions, I won't give my answers.  The grind of the daily keeps a lot of what I think and want to to and want to be from coming out into the open (probably I'm scared of being judged, dismissed, etc.).

Anyway, all that serves as context for what I want to say.  It starts with "I'm relentlessly, hopelessly Trinitarian..."