A while back, Brené Brown posted this excerpt from Margery Williams’ classic “The Velveteen Rabbit” on her blog:

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real, you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out, and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real, you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

I may be one of the few people who made it through childhood without having heard this story. Had I, I probably wouldn’t have gotten it, being the anxious perfectionist that I was in my youth. Now that I’m older, (theoretically) wiser, and definitely a bit ‘shabby’, I get it – and I think there’s some real wisdom here for all of us.

Being real isn’t about being perfect or pretty, about being polished and new. It’s about being genuine and real. As we go through life, we bump into each other, rub off on each other … and through that experience, our personal truth, our real self, can emerge if we let it. While it may not be ‘beauty’ in the way that magazine ads, TV shows, and movies portray it, it’s a much more real and genuine beauty. In fact, it’s much like the beauty we often admire in nature – creeks and rivers don’t flow in straight lines, mountains aren’t perfectly smooth and symmetrical, forests aren’t laid out in a grid. Natural beauty is shaped by different forces interacting, conflicting, pushing against each other. That conflict produces amazing things. As it is with the rest of nature, so it is with us – only if we allow this process to take place and see it for what it truly is can our true and unique beauty emerge and can we do the things we are truly meant to do in the world.