Introspection
But, I Thought I Was an Open Book?
Isn’t it funny when you’ve worked diligently on a public persona so much that you inevitably start to let it falter? Letting it dismantle, unbeknownst to you somehow, until someone else makes note of how such and such you are.
The polar opposite of what you’d been trying to portray. Great.
The finale of my year spent working and living with forty people, I’d say they got to know me better than most people. They were there when I was depressed for an entire five week month in Hanoi, when I realized my biggest perceived failure also in Hanoi (a yikes month), when I wasthisclosetoquitting in Kuala Lumpur, when I second guessed every thought I had in Buenos Aires, when my Mom came to visit the first time in Argentina, when I had an (I thought) clandestine affair with a Colombian God, to literally pooping my pants in Mexico City (verdad). They saw me, through me, all of me.
A nicely crafted persona for the masses
It was both maddeningly frustrating and immeasurably comforting.
It was both maddeningly frustrating and immeasurably comforting.
I was never alone, always able to find a reliable shoulder or ear, just to release my deepest darkest to a thoughtful and understanding human. But, I was also never alone. The guilt of taking alone time for vast amounts (as my Capricornian tendency leans) was difficult for me to allow. They didn’t need me, really, but my ego told me they mostly did. Ha. Fool.
I’d always seen myself as an open book. Ask me about my hair, to that time I died, to why I use a menstrual cup, to my spirituality, to my first ayahuasca sippity sip… whatever. You couldn’t startle me with a question I didn’t expect or a story I hadn’t thought out already. So, when I was at a dinner with three of these people I’d spent an entire twelve months with, I was floored when I heard, you know Vik you’re pretty hard to figure out.
Ummmm?! I’d spent, what I thought to be, the better part of my teenage and adult years in constructing a guise that deemed me wide tf open.
But, I wasn’t?
Nope, never alone
They laughed while my bottom lip grazed the floor. My identity started to ethereally disassemble around me, like when all the spells in The Deathly Hallows come down in pieces above Hogwarts because Voldemort is just pure evil and can kick all your well intentioned tries into the raging river below. Great.
Comments like, it took me a few months to realize you weren’t really who you were putting on and well, I realized you were putting on a front pretty early so I let you rock that, but I knew girl, ensued. Huh, well isn’t that interesting.
I started to wonder if most people I came across could see the farce I put up or these particular people just got enough doses of me to see the fraudulence? Or maybe, most people didn’t care enough to inconvenience a person so much by demolishing their contrived personality. I mean come on, that’s a little brazen tbh.
It’s now August and two months have passed since this seemingly lightweight conversation and it’s still high key in my mind. Did I become what I abhor? A fraud? Is it even that serious? Is anything even that serious? Yikes.
Ugh. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t so damn introspective because honestly, it’s a grueling process. Who are we if we don’t construct ourselves!?
In my experience, (which, not for nothin, is chock full of social experiments [cults, let’s face it]),whether it’s subconscious or not, we craft who we are to the outside world. The truth is, you might sometimes pick your nose and eat it, maybe you diligently inspect your pores every morning, or you get sucked into YouTube tarot card readings (lol…). The truth part B is that you probably don’t show this self to the outside world, you leave it in your sacred home where only you know your weird idiosyncrasies that should never see the light of day. Does this mean you’re a fraud? You have two selves, at least, so thus you’re two faced?
This was the conversation I had with myself for the past two months. After all of that deep, megacognitive duress, I realized.
Over time and with a life coach here or there, I tried something that has significantly altered my thoughts on this very thing. I was given the homework to, over a course of however long it took, to consider all the masks I wear. The small perfectionist girl, the sexualized teen, the athlete, the frugal saver, and so on. Take time with each mask, write down when you believe it originated in you, why it arose, how it expresses itself [or is perceived by others] and definitely jot down the age at which you recall this mask first showing itself. Then, whenever that mask is triggered, speak to that self in the voice, tone, and delivery of the age at which you believe it arose. Tell that mask what it needs to be told; perfectionism isn’t living and we all have to make mistakes in order to level up, for example. Give this exercise a try and keep it up! Tell us or your therapist about what you learned.