Open Up Your Heart and Let Yourself Out!

"Don't you see? I'm not Lula Mae Barnes, 
but I'm not Holly Golightly either!"

Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's

Every year since 2004, I’ve directed a retreat I call Open Up Your Heart and Let Yourself Out. The focus of this retreat is on a particular human tendency that haunts many people: the fear of self that leads to an endless flight from self. 

Those of us who grew up in addictive households have struggled for years with the misguided belief that we aren’t good enough. As a result, we’ve also struggled with an inner-need to escape from ourselves. And so we’ve run and run and run from the very person who dwells within us; the one that we are so afraid to face. Maybe we’re fearful of finding out that this person inside of us really isn’t good enough. Or maybe our fear is just the opposite: Maybe we’re fearful of finding out we actually are good enough and our whole identity will be turned upside-down.

During my retreat, I use the characters of Holly Golightly and Paul Varjak from Breakfast at Tiffany’s to illustrate the addictive need to run from self. Holly (whose real name is Lula Mae Barnes) and her younger brother Fred were placed in foster care at an early age, and Holly was forced into the role of being Fred’s mother as well as his sister. So we have a young girl who is abandoned by her parents and then forced to abandon her own childhood.

At age 14, Holly decides to begin running from herself and her life. She takes Fred and the two of them run away from the foster home they’ve been living in. Eventually, they come across a farm owned by a veterinarian, Doc Golightly. Doc is recently widowed with kids of his own. He takes Holly and Fred in and decides to marry Holly. So at 14 years old, Holly is now a wife and literally a mother to Doc’s kids as well as to Fred.

Holly can’t handle her new reality and so she runs away and continues running from herself and life. She runs and runs and runs. Eventually, she ends up in Los Angeles and thinks she wants to be a fashion model or actress. She meets an agent who arranges for a screen test, but the day before the test, Holly flies away to New York. She can’t face the test, the possibility of failure or of people finding out who she really is: worthless little Lula Mae. In New York, Holly settles for being a prostitute. She seems to figure that it’s all she’s worth in this world. 

Eventually, Holly meets Paul Varjak, who moves into her apartment building. Turns out Paul is a high-priced callboy. He started out being a writer and even published a book of short stories, but like Holly, Paul didn’t believe in himself—and so he was running from himself in the same way Holly was running from herself. Paul is afraid to go inside and find out who Paul really is and so he chooses to rely on his outer-beauty to get him through life.

Holly and Paul turn out to be good for each other. Paul, in particular, begins to see how Holly is mirroring his life back to him. He’s able to see that he has been running from himself and he decides he doesn’t want to run from Paul anymore. Instead, he decided to take time enough to get to know Paul. He gets back in touch with his writing talent and quickly has articles published in major magazines. He then cuts off his female clientele and ends his career as a callboy.

Paul stops running from himself and he gets his life back as he discovers that there is a lot of good to being Paul Varjak. Unfortunately, despite all of his efforts, Holly isn’t as strong or as willing to take her life back. And so she continues to run and run and run from Lula Mae Barnes.

We all have a choice in life. We can choose to run from our real selves as we allow our fears to control our lives, or we can choose to stop running, to face our real selves and to own our lives.

If we choose to run, we will forever run from one city to another, from one job to another, from one lie to another. In making this choice, we continue to believe that we aren’t good enough and that we have no real value. And so we will continue to accept jobs that are beneath us and relationships that are abusive to us.

If we choose to stop running and face ourselves, we will most likely find that the person we’ve been running from for so long is actually a pretty swell person. Like Paul Varjak, we’ll find that we’ve been running from a mistaken identity, from a person who was nothing more than a lie that someone told us and that we believed. And underneath that lie, we’ll find the REAL us: The talented, attractive, personable and very likeable us that we never took time to discover and acknowledge before.

If you are still running from yourself, I hope you decide to stop long enough to meet and love the really wonderful person that you are. Open up your heart and let yourself out!