Pentimento - Letting The Real You Shine Through

The word pentimento comes from the art world where painters, particularly some of the old world masters would often paint over an image and then later the painting would fade and the old image would begin to show through. I think this happens with people, as well. In our first act we develop a persona, an image, if you will, of ourselves that is designed, more or less to show to and be approved by the outside world. In fact, I would say that this image building is more or less the major activity of the first act of life. Who are we? What are we good at? Who will we associate with and what will we do with our time and talents? This begins at puberty and goes on for another twenty, thirty, maybe even forty years. In many cases, we become what we set out to become, or we become what our parents, teachers, spouses and bosses want us to become. Most of us want to be successful in the world and we look for others to mentor and guide us in this process.. By our mid forties, this image, this persona is pretty well set but is it the true you or simply a painted over version of an earlier image that begins to show through whether you want it to or not?

But where does this earlier image come from? It comes from deep within your soul and is there in childhood. Most people, if they look back on when they were say eight or ten years old they will see their true nature. But this nature, particularly if it does not fit the norm for your family and community will be “painted over” by years of social conditioning and peer pressure. Children are rewarded for being good little boys and girls not for showing their true colors. I was both a tomboy and a budding artist/writer when I was ten years old, but this was not looked on in my southern family as appropriate or useful behavior for a girl. What my mother and my father wanted from me was that I become a “little lady” and help my mother around the house by being a kind of second mother to my siblings. Going out into the woods and creating stories about the people I made up out of my imagination and then building “houses” for them out of the sticks and stones and whatever else I could find, was not what they had in mind for me.

Spending hours on my bed reading left my mother cold too – “Get in here, Lorraine and help me with this laundry, I can’t do this all by myself.” She would say. Then later when as a married woman I decided to go back to school for a degree she asked me why I did this and when I said I wanted to go to work and have a career she said, “ I thought your husband had a good job, doesn’t he provide for you and the kids?” When I told her that wasn’t it, she told me that a decent woman stayed home and took care of her children unless her husband was unable to do it and then she might go to work, but only then. So I got no approval from my family for my true self which was from early on a dreamer, a thinker and a creative person.

Then after I graduated from college I got that job – that career - and I listened then to all the voices of the women’s movement, which told me that the juice of life was in the corporate world of business. I dressed for success and I went out there and tried to have sisterhood with all the other feminist but what I found was I didn’t like that world. I found no sisterhood, all I found were women, and men, trying to best each other so they could get a heads up on you in the drive for promotion and ultimately, success. It wasn’t creative, it wasn’t interesting and it sure the heck didn’t fit any dreams I’d had back in the woods when I was building those dream houses out of sticks and stones. I was disillusioned.

So I quit the corporate world and became a therapist. I put a little more paint on my image and tried to make it stick, but this too turned out to be a non creative, often depressing world where I felt like I was going into a dark wet cave everyday trying to help the people in this cave get out of it and back into the sunshine. I was able, Thank God, to get some of them out, but most didn’t budge.

Then about five years ago I began to see this other image in the mirror when I looked really close. The pentimento of my true self was starting to shine through all that family and societal conditioning. I began to unburden myself of other people’s opinions of me, and what I should or should not do or be. I joined a writing group and found my true niche with the other writers.  I started taking only the clients I felt were capable of living in the sunshine and I eventually closed my practice and became a full time writer – what I had always wanted to do and be all along.

But, what about you? What is trying to show through your public image? What image is under there wanting to be freed from the layers and layers and layers of social conditioning and pressure from others to be something you truly are not? If you could strip off the paint of years of pretending and going along with the program, what do you think would show through for you? Who are you underneath all that slapped on paint and gunk from the outside world? Don’t you think it’s time for you to take a peek and see what shows up? Think about it, and then start divesting yourself of the image you present to the world that is not you but only a pentimento of your true self.

Do this illuminating exercise - Think back on what you were like at ten years old and write up a profile of yourself or tell it like a fairy tale - describe your likes, dislikes, favorite stories, favorite heroes, favorite activities and who your friends were and what you did.  What made you laugh and what made you cry?  See if the true you shows up and how you might begin to let him or her show through now and get yourself out there into the sunshine before it's too late. 


Blessings, Lorraine