Take Me As I Am

Earlier in the semester, Caitlin and I stopped in a really neat CD store on a little alley headed towards our University.  We occasionally would stop there and pick out a CD, or ask them what was CD was playing, because they always had great taste in music.  Once we stumbled upon an album titled “Still Night, Still Light” by Au Revoir Simone.  I have no recollection of what about it stuck out to us, but we wrote it down one a little scrap of paper, which was inevitably lost, and then found again at some point.  This album eventually made its way onto my iTunes and has since then been rising on my “Most Played” playlist, or in particular, the song “Take Me As I Am”.  It is a short song, a simple song, just hitting 2 minutes and 23 seconds.  The message is pure, plain, and und unpolluted.  Some of the lyrics are:

“Do you know when you were already born

Do you know this is the way it would be

Do you know that when you were already born

You were already you

and I already me

So take me as I am

Take me as I am

I know,

it’s easier said than done”

I think I like it because sometimes I feel like I am just too much.  I am too wild, too spastic, too intense, or maybe too flighty.  I like to dance and look like a fool.  I like to sing along with songs and I usually laugh longer and harder than most.  Sometimes I try to train myself to be better behaved.  Or try to “do” better.  Guess what... I am done trying to do better, done trying to behave.  I was born full of life, with a spirit of adventure, a spirit of mischief (disclaimer: harmless mischief).  My grandma Hazel always used to say that I had a mischievous twinkle in my eye, even as a baby.  Well folks, that twinkle isn’t going anywhere.  It IS me!  I am a world shaker (Cool Hand Luke reference)!  I will not be tamed.

And whoever you are... yeah you, that person who doesn’t take me as I am, that person looking at me on the metro when I unrestrainedly bob my head to the music blaring in my headphones, or that boy who was just waiting for me to settle down, well you will have to wait a long time, because I am not going to change!  Deal with it!

I’m saying this only under the parameters that I am willing to take you as you are.  Who ever you are, I appreciate you.  I appreciate your spirit, which is God given and so inherently and intrinsically connected to who you are.  I appreciate your story, I want to know your story, to respect you by listening to your story.  I want to know who you are, who you truly are.  It is a shame we are both behaving and not breaking social norms, but rather riding a metro in silence.  I will  never know you, but I accept you.

**For clarity sake, I am not talking about not improving yourself, because I am always seeking to make progress and better myself through reading, education, experiences, discipline, etc., but rather referring to that which doesn’t change about us, the core of who we are, the good things that make us unique.  I don’t want to change those things about myself.