OK, I admit it: I'm a recovering self-help junkie.

My drug of choice was books that told me how to become happier, healthier, thinner, sexier (though I never actually did the programs). I felt comforted to know that if I just worked hard enough, I could make myself over into a loveable, wonderful me.

That changed at around 50. I just got plumb tuckered out from trying so hard to make my inside (and my outside) match up to the expert of the moment's Prescription for a Happy Life. What started engaging me a whole lot more than being the ultimate with-it woman was learning how to nurture and celebrate me. Kinky, marvelously imperfect me.

I remembered the story told by Rabbi Zusya many hundreds of years ago to his students. He said something like, "You know, in the world to come, God's not gonna ask me 'Why were you not Moses?' or 'Why were you not Abraham?' No way. What God's gonna ask me is 'Why were you not Zusya?'"

What a question! What if we ask our sweet selves the same question, not in the hereafter, but now?

I started asking myself, and fell in love with my life.

I "came out" as the unexpurgated me for one of my 50th birthday presents to myself. I wrote, with the love and support of my incredible girlfriends, a wildly truthful profile of myself for an online dating service. Here I am, world, I said, this is who I am in all my luscious imperfection. Not a sanitized, presentable, nice version (no small task for someone who was constantly told as a child to "behave yourself"). It took me six months (and loving, um, butt-kicking, from said girlfriends) to write it and dare to post it. And oh, once the terror of such visibility passed, the exhilarating freedom of finally showing up as the real thing, not everyone else's version of what I should be!***

Looks like I'm not the only one stepping out (if we burned our bras in the 70's, maybe now we toss our self-help books in the same fire). Studies show that boomer women, in droves, are far more interested in getting real than in getting fixed. They're (we’re!) a whole lot more excited about just being ourselves than in wasting precious life energy trying to make themselves into someone else's version of Woman. No more shoehorning our ripe and fertile spirits into a teeny, airbrushed Madison Avenue self. Rather, the invitation (and the compelling urge) at this wonderful, icon-breaking time of our lives is to let go of that "pretend" self, and meet the world from our glorious, hard-earned, rich complexity.

I'm still thrilled to grow and learn-I just don't want to waste my time in the ultimate unkindness of demanding that I be other than who I really am. I read a self-help book every now and then, and I love my monthly Oprah magazine. How do I know what's supporting my journey of unfolding aliveness, and what's falling back into the nasty pit of self-improvement? Here are my three criteria:

    * Does it (book, program, class) leave me feeling more alive, or smaller and constricted?

    * Am I trying it from a place of curiosity, playfulness, and self-kindness, or from a place of beating myself up for not being perfect?

    * Do I experience it as a luscious invitation or a life-sucking should?

As I give up improving myself, and spend more time and energy dancing to my own internal music, I find myself falling deeper and deeper in love with me. With me. Who woulda thunk it?

I have a client, an artist, who once brought in a manifesto on second hand art, art that looks like someone else's, that is wanting for that vital, creative, unto itself sort of spark. After reading me this manifesto, she said that after coaching it was how she felt about her life as well. No more second hand life! No more life cobbled together from everyone else's ideas about how her life should look, and how she should be. From then on she engaged in the delightful adventure of living a first-hand life.

So, ladies: No more second-hand lives! No more second-hand selves! What do you need in order to become the finest, most nourished first hand you? What, and who, will support you claiming your first hand life? What's your first step, to your own soul's music?

*** If you're curious about what happened, I received--to my total delight--almost 40 responses from very interested men, including, first and foremost, my husband! What I really got from this (along with the love of my life) was knowing that what lights others up is a lit-up me.