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Do you ever get the feeling that who you think you are isn’t who you really are? And that maybe who you really are is someone that who you think you are wouldn’t like — or at least wouldn’t feel comfortable being?
A lot of the stories here talk about people discovering and becoming their “true selves,” and it seems like — in the stories at least — they’re a lot happier.
Back when I assumed I was male, I would look at myself in the mirror and not really see my body. One of those seeing-but-not-seeing things. And if I saw a photograph of myself, I didn’t like it, I thought I was ugly. As I travelled the path to and through transition, I noticed that I could look at myself in the mirror and see a person. Hardly beautiful, but okay, kind of average, definitely not really “ugly.” (I still can’t see my eye color, though.)
Now when I look at who I am (in life, not in the mirror), I have the sneaking feeling that I’m seeing-but-not-seeing myself. I assume I’m really seeing myself, but there’s odd stuff around the edges of my vision that make me wonder if who I think I’m seeing is maybe just kind of a curtain painted to look like who I want to think I am, behind which stands a rather different and very alien person. Sort of like the horror story trope where you see a nice man — a doctor, a neighbor, a parent, even — but then you look down at his feet and you notice that what are sticking out from under his clothes are tentacles, not feet. (Cf.: Men in Black)
Sometimes, when I think too much, I wonder if for some of us, maybe we’re better off not knowing who we really are. Or at least happier.
[29. May 2021]
Comments
Three selves.
I've heard it said that we are actually three people. We are the person we want others to think we are... the facade that we present to the world. We are the person we think we are... the construct in our mind that satisfies our intellectual ideal. Then we are the person we really are.
The first two are lies, or at least constructs that we create, while the third is who we really are and often keep hidden even from ourselves.
There's an interesting article about this online at Soul Transcendence. Where they talk about three selves.
The Conscious Self; the Basic Self and the High Self. They point out that a male person can have female Basic Self and High Self.
"The basic self can be masculine or feminine, and you can also have more than one basic self. For example, a woman can have a female and/or male basic self, and the same is true for a man."
"The high self can also be masculine or feminine."
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Façade self vs. inner self
I don't know about 3 selves. I've know for a long time that I have one self, or persona, that deals with society, and an inner self that only comes out when I feel safe (which only happens when I'm alone.) It was never safe for me to show any part of my inner self, so I think I constructed the outer self to deal with the demands of the people around me and to conform to their expectations. Since I hated those demands to the core of my being, even the outer self didn't conform all that much, only just enough to avoid the worst punishments. (Unfortunately, those demands and the judgements got incorporated into my outer self to a certain extent.)
The result is that I can't really get in touch with my inner self if I'm dealing with other people, which has made therapy difficult. Sometimes during a session I can kind of see stuff from my inner self, but what I see there evaporates when I try to talk. (That's probably a protective mechanism left over when I needed it just to survive.) It doesn't help that my inner self is non-verbal, because the point of language is to communicate with other people, and it wasn't (and often still isn't) safe to communicate anything about the inner me.
BTW, as a non-binary person, phrases like:
feel kind of invalidating, because they imply that those are the only two possibilities. My experience of "masculine" and "feminine" was them being used as straitjackets which the people with power over me tried to force me into, so I have a hard time with the idea that any part of any of my selves has a gender.
I stopped thinking about who I was, a long time ago
and started living as I am. That was nearly 40 years ago, yeah I'm knocking on a bit and been living the dream for that long. Except it isn't a dream and we have to deal with real life, we get ill, pay taxes, go grey and so forth. I know who I am and I know what I am. I live quietly but participate in the real world and mostly am accepted as I present. Sometimes I can be quite girly and wear skirts and makeup and sometimes I'm dressed for wandering through woodland and the understorey as I survey dormice or other wildlife.
I'm a mixture of my ambitions, experiences, relationships and emotions. I don't deny my history if asked directly but neither do I declare it. I'm in stealth or rather, I'm just an ordinary older woman, who happened to have a minor plumbing problem that was solved some years ago. As Jung said, live each day as if it were your last but plan as if you're going to live forever. (Yeah, I know he was a flake).
Angharad
Not thinking doesn't work for me.
The problem with not thinking about who I am is that who I am inside affects my behavior, mostly without my being aware of it. I notice it because I get regularly blindsided when I find myself doing something or reacting in a way that my conscious self can't understand or feels is wrong. It's not full-blown DID, but I do seem to have a number of selves with differing wants and reactions, and sometimes one is driving my behavior and feelings and sometimes another.
As with DID, what I need to do is to become aware of all of them and accept them, so that we can work together. Unfortunately, I had to repress most of them to protect myself, so I kind of am not aware of them -- "knowing and not knowing," in Dr. van der Kolk's words.
Think about it if you must, but don't worry about it.
When I was young, only about 20, I received some good advice from an unexpected quarter - somebody not renowned for intellect. This person said to me: "You try too hard to make everybody like you. I think that you are a good person, but plenty of people will think that you are not. Just forget about them. Be yourself."
It may be the best personal advice that I have ever received. People who don't like me I let walk away, and I don't care. Or I feel free enough to say: "If you don't like me then I think that you should know that I really don't care if you do or don't".
Try it. It is refreshing and enabling.
Maryanne
I think about this a lot.
I think about this a lot. But I think everyone, even those who aren't LGBTQIPA+ think that way from time to time. We are never the same person from moment to moment. The thing about being human is that we evolve.
I was just talking to my mom about this, in a way. I know that my 10-year old self would annoy me, and not just because that self was forced to be a boy. I haven't been that person for 32 years. And that's true for everyone. Our 20 year old self is vastly different even to our 30 year old self, and so on. It's more true for trans/intersex folks than most, in that we're usually forced to hide our true selves, and if we keep doing that into adulthood we get so good at it that we even hide our true selves from ourselves.
That makes it hard to find who we really are inside, but it certainly does feel at least a little bit better when we at least get to try, even if the feeling is not as good as we hoped it would be.