Who are you really? “Who are you?” – such a simple question. What would you answer?
Personally I find it quite difficult. Some time ago my nickname was Visionary, in general it was somehow accumulating my self perception and interactions with people around me. Later something changed somehow. Later on the answer to this question got completely lost. Maybe it doesn’t even exist.
But who we are really? Are you YOU sometimes at all? Does somebody know the real us?
Everyday we play role, along the life we get accustomed to them and eventually we don’t even have a stage fright before the performance. The costume fits perfectly and sticks glued to the skin, if you try to take the gloves off you might have to peel the skin off as well. Make up got absorbed into the skin pores and now resembles a tattoo that you can’t ever get off.
Where ends the real person and starts the actor?
Once I read a description of Tehhi in one of Frai’s books and got scared.. Do I do the same?
“- She’s a mirror, – said Juffin. – Like all children of Loiso, lady Tehhi becomes a reflection of her interlocutor. Their famous father was the best of the mirrors! The most devastating kind of charm… Only when she’s really scared, sad or left alone, then there appears the real Tehhi – not so often if you think so, do you think?..”
Hm.. but almost everybody is doing it. It’s described in first chapters of any book on body languages or books about improving communication with people – mirror them! People love themselves, even the ones who have problems with self esteem. We love ourselves, even though we hate ourselves sometimes.
Does it mean that if I’m mirroring somebody, then it’s not me anymore or it’s just an adaptation aspect of evolution – an attempt of find some mutual points to silence the desire to kill each other being desperate from miscommunication and misunderstandings?
For me it’s hard to imagine a “real” person as a person who took all the masks off. If a person can take all masks off, then he has nothing to do here anymore. Enough of games for him.
If you live in community then you’ll get a mask anyway, or at least a thin layer of makeup. Society! Are you yourself when you’re without it? Hm.. I guess that even with myself I’m wearing a mask – a mask of a person that I aspire to be.
One part of me finds it’s easier and clearer to view people as polyhedra, where every facet is an aspect/characteristic, at the same time the area of facet depends on how much one or another aspect is present in the person. So almost anyone can mirror anybody else, if it’s needed, but the most comfortable it is with those with whom these facets coincide maximaly in size and content.
That is why getting to know another people shouldn’t be like peeling off skin hoping to reach the “real” layer, but should be more like examining a polyhedron maximally from all sides, including “the dark side of the Moon”. If your polyhedron is being studied and at the same time people are not running away in the opposite direction – stick to these people, normally they’re called friends.
What about you? Nice mask.. Do you like theater?