This is from Week 2 of a three-week series on “Personality” by Lloyd C Douglas at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor, preached on January 25, 1920. (This is from Sermons [5], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.)
Regarding the expression of one’s personality:
“Some of you are aware of certain physical defects which militate against the satisfactory expression of your personality. And they are defects, too, which will seriously handicap you. It need not be so, but it is so, because you have thus decreed it, and that is a matter in which you have it all to say. The chances are that what you consider to be a serious defect is but a feature of that personality which you have not yet discovered, and that, instead of being a worrisome liability which you have not yet discovered, it is a distinct asset. Or it might be an asset if you willed it so.
“A many may lose an arm, but that doesn’t necessarily make a cripple of him unless he thinks so. Whenever he stops thinking of himself as a cripple, he stops being a cripple. I know of a case of a young man who arrived at a consciousness of his own personality and his value to himself and the world only by way of losing a leg. He goes about supporting his body on a crutch, but his mind isn’t on crutches, as some of you who heard him recently at the Des Moines Student Convention would be willing to testify.
“I know another man who wasn’t anybody until he had fed all the fingers of his left hand into a planing-mill where he worked as a mechanic. He did not become a cripple. He became one of the most influential lawyers in this country.
“Here is a young man who fears he may never be able to express his personality because he is only five feet three in height. Napoleon was five feet two.
“Here is a person who is conscious of being extremely unbeautiful of countenance. He is ugly. So was Lincoln. This homely and discouraged brother can worry about his appearance if he wants to, and thus have good cause for worry. Or he can make his homeliness an asset, until not for anything in the world would he permit a change of face. He will come to feel about it as Montaigne did when he ordered the artist who was preparing to do his portrait to paint him with all his warts. He knew that a wartless Montaigne wouldn’t be Montaigne at all. The warts were part of his personality.
“Here is a man who stammers. He thinks he is doomed. So he is, if he thinks that. Some of the most delightfully attractive people who have ever graced human society have stuttered their way through life, not only unimpaired by this apparent defect but actually making their peculiarity a part of the personality which became beloved.
“One could go on, multiplying illustrations by the hour of people who turned their obstacles into stepping stones. And I suppose it would be even more voluminous if one were to amass the literature to be had concerning those who have permitted their apparent defects to eat, like a cancer, into their very souls, making them diffident, morose, self-conscious, and ineffective — not to speak of their unthinkable wretchedness. One man believes that, if he were taller, he might command attention; another would be gayer; another would be wittier; another would weigh fifty pounds more. Why, if mere avoir dupois is his standard of success, he wouldn’t succeed if he weighed a ton. Verily, the life is more than meat.
“So, we have to get back again to the principle that if one is to express his personality, he must express his personality, just as it has been bequeathed to him, rejoicing that he is exactly as he is, for it is the sum total of him that makes him an individual.
“Get that fixed in your mind. Stop wishing you were somebody else. Stop trying to act like somebody else. Be yourself.
“The girl who tampers with her eyebrows in the hope that she may look a little more like all the other girls who have tampered with their eyebrows has quite a large distance to go before she discovers her personality. Obviously, she doesn’t want a personality, since she is so bent upon destroying what little there is.
“Be yourself. You’re really so much nicer that way.”
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