The first time I engaged in any introspection whatsoever was at the age of 33, a few months after my marriage ended, mumblety-mumble (many) years ago.

I became somewhat depressed, and a doctor recommended therapy, for which I’m deeply grateful. The therapist noticed, as a dead camel with half an eye open might have, that I had zero connection to myself, and would not have noticed a feeling if it stood up in my porridge.

One of the things she prescribed was that I do the Myers Briggs personality assessment.

Among other things, I discovered that I was an ‘I’– an introvert. In fact, I practically fell off the end of the scale. Very, very introverted.

This explained to me why I got jangly when I didn’t have time alone. Why I couldn’t easily handle cross-conversation at a restaurant. Why I preferred dinners to parties, and having an office with a door that closed to an open-plan set-up.

What I found as I began to go through life with the awareness of myself as an introvert is that it’s misunderstood. People think it means you’re antisocial, shy or socially inept, none of which I am. And I don’t seem like an introvert, to the extent that recently over dinner, when I mentioned to a reasonably old friend that I’m an introvert, she said, and I quote, “No you’re not.”

Leaving aside the merits of having one’s self-assessment categorically contradicted, I can see why she’d think that. I am also deeply socialized – that is, very much able to observe and accommodate what is required in a social setting. It’s a survival mechanism.

I worked for decades in a very social milieu, more of a lifestyle than a job in many ways, and – most importantly – for most of my life I pretty much assumed that if I was different from other people, they were probably right and I wrong.

We coaches traffic in personality assessments of many stripes – Myers Briggs, Kolbe, How to Fascinate (yes, really…), Enneagram, Strengths Finder, Values, and so on. All really helpful.

The goal is to know ourselves and, in the knowing, come to accept and love the self we have so often judged and rejected.

It can be liberating and affirming. When you’re sick with a puzzling ailment – or when you wonder why you can’t stop drinking to excess every night – it is a true relief to know you have an actual, diagnosable, treatable illness, or that you’re an alcoholic, also treatable.

And I think that in stopping there, we deny ourselves the full range of our potential and possibility. Yes, I am an introvert, and I am SO much more.

This week I saw a chicken crossing the road. He stood between the parked cars, watching an approaching SUV. Just as it was nearly upon him, he darted forward; it was as if he was resolved to demonstrate that his little chicken legs could outrun an SUV. The driver slammed on his brakes and stopped in time. The chicken retreated to his side of the road, watching again.

When the SUV started forward, he ran in front of it again. I found myself with mixed emotions, because I suspect this is the danged rooster that wakes me up most dawns. But I couldn’t help feeling impressed by this crazy little guy, and I did step up and usher him away from the road.

Not to anthropomorphize, and I suspect his issue was poor judgment and the lack of any spatial sense more than risk-taking, but still – indulge me for a moment.

A chicken can’t outrun an SUV, but I like to think that because he didn’t know that, he went for it.

He didn’t self-identify as a tiny, scrawny fowl, but as a really focused, fast runner who wanted to get to the other side and wouldn’t let anything stop him.

If I focus too much on my introversion, I can easily start to throw in the towel in the face of the natural discomfort that many of us experience when we try new things. I can start to cocoon myself and use it as an excuse not to take risks. I can tell myself I can’t handle parties, and thus fail to connect with my community. I can tell myself I can’t speak in front of people, and thus curtail opportunities to extend myself professionally.

I may choose not to do those things, but I want it to be that – a choice, not a result of my self-imposed limitations.

Sometimes our limits grow from old beliefs and perspectives that have been handed down to us. Sometimes we’re limited by society’s expectations and restrictions upon us, whether because of gender, race, age or ethnicity. Bigotry and oppression do attempt to restrict us, and it’s not helpful to pretend they don’t.

So we can acknowledge that, find support, find community, find healing – and then find ways to rise anyway.

The brilliant Orson Welles said “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations”, and I see what he meant – choosing constraints for the ways we choose to live and function in the world is called for if we are not to fragment and diffuse our art and our work.

But this is not the same as seeing ourselves as free, transcendent creatures who are so much bigger and more powerful that we imagine or believe.

How do you limit yourself? What labels have you, your family, your culture placed on you that you’ve internalized and believed?

Introvert – extrovert – whatever – you are a vast, creative being of limitless possibility. You contain multitudes, and you have the ability to transcend limitation.

Yesterday I decided, partly as a displacement activity to avoid writing this, partly because I felt a strange pull in that direction, to tidy a huge pile of old journals and notebooks, some personal, some related to work and projects.  Inevitably, as I sorted them, I delved inside, and, a few times, fell down a rabbit hole of reading and reminiscing.

For some years I’ve written, on and off, Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages (from “The Artist’s Way”)– it’s a beautiful, helpful, introspective process. She recommends not rereading them immediately, and I don’t – but here I was confronted with morning pages from six, twelve, nineteen years ago (I first worked through the book in 1997).

What struck me repeatedly was – not only that I seemed to have had the same issues in my life for some decades, but also – how much wisdom and insight I have always had into how to improve things. And yet, for many years things didn’t seem to improve.

Now, there have been several overtly definitive events in my life, in various areas such as relationships, jobs, big moves, trauma. Apart from those visited upon me from outside, they probably boil down to two things, in terms of my actions: either leaving too soon, or staying too long.

Underneath and behind those actions, of course, lay beliefs or thoughts – I made a mistake, I must not be lovable, How could I think this would work?/This should be working/ I can make this work/ There’s no way to make this work. And so on.

Perceptions of the world and what was happening that usually revolved around me and my self-image, even when the attention appeared to be fully on the other person/job/place/whatever.

For some years I held the view that I had made irredeemable mistakes. That I had taken actions, or failed to take actions, that meant I could never be happy again; I’d never get what I wanted; I had peaked and it was all downhill now.

I dug myself into a deep hole, a spiral of shame and despair.

I was coached and counseled to let go of these beliefs. To dissolve these thoughts and replace them with new ones. To inquire into them and, by doing so, loosen them and see whether something else might be true or truer.

These strategies can be helpful. I did try, but I believed my thoughts were based on objective truth – mistakes HAD been made, I HAD wrecked my life with some of my choices.

What I needed was a clean slate, or, as I began to think of it: forgiveness.

I spent some of my formative years in the evangelical church. I bought into the idea of original sin – that I was fundamentally flawed and needed to be “saved” in order to live an abundant life and go to heaven. Forgiveness was meted out by God and his offsider Jesus, but only if I confessed my many transgressions, and acknowledged that I was, at the heart of it, wrong, bad and broken. Those among us who have been traumatized, neglected or abused might be particularly vulnerable to these ideas.

These days I view all of this as dangerous, damaging codswallop, but still, for many years anything that smacked of these beliefs was very hard for me to stomach. Once I broke away from the church, I held to a different view of myself, one in which I was actually not broken or intrinsically wrong, but my hold on that was precarious and I could not countenance anything that challenged it.

So when I began to think about forgiving myself, implicit in the very idea of forgiveness seemed to be the notion that there was something to forgive – that some wrong had been done. How could I detach from that idea, while still freeing myself from the bonds of self-criticism?

I started to think of forgiveness not in the sense of a self-righteous and falsely benevolent way of pointing out harm while magnanimously accepting an apology (but not really) –  but in the sense a person might be pardoned of a crime – they are absolved and free, as if never convicted.

All the mistakes I believed I’d made – they had never existed (and they actually hadn’t). Everything could begin again, as if nothing had happened (because it actually hadn’t).

This clearly requires a new approach to thoughts and beliefs. This requires that I see the deep truth that I live in the feelings of my thoughts, not of my circumstances – that in fact thought is all we ever really experience.

So does this mean that I need to examine, or attempt to change, my thoughts?

No – to manage my reactions to what’s occurred doesn’t make sense when I consider that my thinking created “what’s occurred” in the first place. All I need to do is to remind myself I am always whole, and I always have peace of mind and clarity.

Forgiveness of myself means I can return, in this moment, to who I have always been, with all the same potential and possibility, and can begin anew, fresh, today.

That I am, now, exactly who I was born to be, always doing my best to live my life as well as I can, before my mind created thoughts of  mistakes, regrets and rifts.

This, my friend, feels like peace and freedom.