Pre-Amble:
I’ve started over a year ago to try to get to know myself. I set off with the goal of becoming self-aware. Not the self-aware you are thinking, because you’re probably thinking that you’re self aware. Well you’re not. The human ego is a terrifying thing that makes you believe you’re self-aware. You think you know yourself. But what you know is the ‘personality’ you’ve developed over your entire lifetime that you present to/project onto others. The one that is moulded and shaped by the unconscious coping mechanisms you develop when you confront difficulty, challenges, adversity.
The goal I am trying to reach is to be able to see beyond my ‘instinctively programmed’ reactions to stimuli, to the place in my mind that helped form the shape of my outwardly expressed personality. To be able to actually see and experience, not simply understand, how my ‘personality’ is perceived by others, so I am able to make changes to my ‘programming’ to become the best person I can be, to live the most fruitful, happy life. I want to know my inconsistencies, my flaws, my unconscious coping mechanisms.
Basically to be able to experience life on a day to day basis from an objective perspective.
Amble:
I feel I’m coming very close to becoming self-aware, but there came a problem.
I’m now stuck in a transitional state where what I found out about myself I don’t like, to the point that I don’t know how to proceed.
I’ve already discovered MANY of my coping mechanisms (and the source experiences that caused them including total abandonment of entire groups of friends, forgotten sexual assault by my grandfather, etc) and how these coping mechanisms often hurt people around me to varying degrees without my conscious awareness.
I’ve discovered that I’m a pretty terrible person. Awful. Seriously. Not from a “Oh, woe is me, lets feel bad for James” standpoint, but from the objective view that I’m not obtaining of myself. When walking down the street, I would not want to know me. I would not want to get involved with my psychopathic delusions that I often drift between, sharing time with them and an actual reality.
I create a hell out of a heaven. Objectively, I know I have a descent life, I have an education and a ‘good job’. But now I hate my job because upon realizing who I am I now understand that I’m a fraud. I was never supposed to go into the field I did – I’ve pin- pointed it to me choosing my line of education/work/future because I tried to prove my ex-girlfriends Dad wrong – that I was good enough for his daughter. And my whole life I’ve been telling myself lies, constantly, constantly, constantly, and everyone else lies – as a coping mechanism (which started when I unconsciously realized I was gay without allowing myself to accept it).
Now that I’m trying to peel away layers of my ‘life’ (which I consider most of it to be lies) I’m finding the person “I’ve become” is someone so far from where I want to be. And the personality that guides my life through this shared objective experience comes across as a lying, theiving, dishonest, unreliable, indecisive asshole, but this whole time I’ve been trapped in an inward cycle of dishonestly, theft, neediness (of strength/feeling of being wanted/love) directed at myself. I’ve been keeping myself in a sphere of non-truths my whole life, and I use intricate “logical reasoning” that only makes sense if you follow an “if this, then that” flow.
But when I look at the whole picture, I self-rationalize things, events, emotions, everything, in a tight ball little logical ball that if one hair of the whole head of neatly “forcedly tamed” hair is tossled or tweezed, the entire facade will all fall apart, leading to an emotional breakdown – without me being able to recognize how it happened, what caused it, even how to stop it – since I don’t know the source.
Anyway,
ever since I found that out, I’ve been having a hard time accepting who I’ve been portraying myself to others, because I don’t feel it’s still the real me coming to the surface. I am soft, compassionate, full of love, but I don’t have any way of showing this yet, because I can’t even direct it at myself.
I just want to love myself, and one other, and be and feel loved back.
I’m at a loss.
Has anyone ever gone through anything similar?
Thanks for reading.
P.S. I don’t want a pity party, I always force my own self pity on others, which makes me feel like I can’t ever talk about these issues – because I fall into the willingness to accept a pity party very easily. But I’m SO sick of feeling sorry for myself. I’m f’ing sick of it. I’m sick of crying, I’m sick of being a baby.
I’m a 24 year old grown man with grown up responsibilities – but I feel like a baby stuck in this state of stasis.
1 comment
I think you’ve made an enormous progress. To realise the things about yourself, and about your life….that’s quite an achievement.
I think I know exactly the experiences yor’re going through; all those terms, such as ‘facade’, ‘lies’, ‘dishonesty’, ‘logical reasoning’ and ‘self-rationalisation’ sound uncannily familiar to me (not to mention the gay part).
But anyway, I guess there are different paths leading to one’s intended destination. I chose the path of a hermit and abandoned the society that I was in (both literally and metaphorically speaking). But perhaps you may find the path to happiness (and maybe complete your journey to self-awareness) by adopting a less radical approach.
Of course, there are certain things you can never be in control of (such as your desire to share your compassionate side and love with someone else….and receive the same in return, as we don’t hold the magical powers of attracting the right people and events into our life), but such a realisation needn’t be a negative thing: you should allow a fair amount of mystery and uncertainty into your life, because not everything depends on logical reasoning (the courts of law being an exception :> ).