« It’s difficult for anyone to get to know the real you if you downplay your real feelings, needs, and wants in your relationship«
Unknown
This hits hard because I think it’s is my biggest problem when it comes to relationships.
I’m talking about human relationships altogether, no matter the type.
For me this is closely related to expectations.
I expect people to understand how I think and feel, pretty fast. Depending on the context, I expect people to get where I’m heading when I speak and explain my train of thoughts, and when they don’t, I adapt, and by adapting, I hide my real feelings and my needs. How do I get to say what I really feel and express my opinions without the fear of being judged? So this is also linked to another subject (widely approached in so many quotes and human development advices): be indifferent to judgment. Easy to say, hard to do.
We all want to be validated, that is the truth, and no matter how hard we try to prove it’s not the case, deep inside that is a real need. A human need. The level of this need is another thing. For some it is a deep one for others just something that helps in order to show more and more of ourselves. It’s a nudge in the right direction. But how can we keep a balance in all this? How do we know that what we are and think is the result of our own principles and beliefs, or the result of the seek of validation. How do we know that the way we shape ourselves is by being true to ourselves or just by responding to other people’s opinions?
It takes courage to put ourselves out there and be indifferent to how we are seen. No matter what, we’re always going to take into account the way people might react to what we say and do. But up to what point? That is the real question. So how do we get to show the real “us” if we hide it of fear to be rejected, be belittled, be discarded?
In an ideal world, everyone should be heard, really heard, seen and given a space in which they can feel secure enough to express themselves. The world we live in right now, is hardly the ideal one. We have to juggle with untrained egos, with false beliefs, with manipulation and hidden agendas. We have to guess what the other one really thinks and how they’ll act if we put ourselves out there. So the true ones, the ones who just want to share their inner world with the others, are faced with a real struggle: should they impose themselves in a soft yet determined way, or should they downplay it all just so their feeling don’t get hurt?
In the end: is it worthed to show how we really are if at the end we are rejected? Which leads to an obvious one: when is it worthed and when it is not worthed?
And that brings me to another quote that says:
“learn to distinguish who needs and explanation, who deserves only one answer and who deserves absolutely nothing”.
The initial quote’s message is a kind one: show who you really are otherwise you’ll never be relaxed and will easily be frustrated. It’s an advice that is meant to help so our relationships can be build on a sane ground. But at the same time, it’s a dangerous one, as it makes us think that exposing ourselves can only bring good, so the significance of the opposite, of being misunderstood and treated as such, could very well not be taken into consideration, which means the result can change: we’re either surrounded by people and not showing who we really are, or we chose to be isolated and keep our inner world protected. I guess it all depends on how “the real you” fits in this world.
Finding people who actually want to know you, is hard. Those people go beyond the appearances and have the necessary curiosity to “dig deeper”, but they are very rare, and if I come to think about it, this initial quote addresses that issue ONLY when interacting with these particular kind of people. And as they are rare, they mostly hide who they are, because of all the reasons I’ve mentioned before.
As I was saying before, people often have hidden agendas. They are biased, they judge, they put labels, they never give the benefit of the doubt. If your words resemble even a little bit to another one’s, someone’s who’s already been labeled and discarded, the rest of your story is not really heard anymore, you’ve been put in a box and you have no right to “an appeal”. It’s all white noise.
I happen to feel when that moment comes, when I’m becoming white noise and when all I say falls into a whole, when the messages I’m sending have no receiver on the other end. So I stop and downplay my inner thoughts, needs and feelings. And what is worse (but that’s me), I get angry and judge also: how can that person be so indifferent and not see what I mean and not take it into consideration? I don’t need it to be seen as an absolute truth, but I need it to be put into the equation that the human interaction is and within which, there are different elements and they all count. We must all be given a chance to express ourselves, within limits, enough so we can be fairly assessed and be treated as we deserve.
That makes me think: we all want to be good people, right? No one wants to be seen as the bad guy and of course, no one wants to put it out there and expect to be liked. But there are the “bad guys”, too many of them, and they hide behind pretty masks that make a good person open and in the end, get hurt. Yes, it’s naïve to think that it “shouldn’t be this way”, it’s been this way from the beginning of times and it gets worse and worse because we no longer need to improve ourselves, the technology does that for us, some people invent tools that are meant to help a certain segment of population or a certain field of science, and inevitably, those tools are being used on a way larger scale and end up being indispensable.
So I ask: how can we show the real US, the one born from real introspection, when 90% of the world out there is fake and not even close to grasping the concept of authenticity?
I guess we still have to search for those rare people, hope that we meet some of them, manage to show who we really are and build real and healthy relationships. And meanwhile, let’s not be blamed that we don’t give others a chance to see us how we are because most of them don’t even know who they are, they are driven by the outside artificial world and they appropriate concepts and ideas that are not born from their own reflections.
Why the need of inner reflection when everything has already been analyzed, calculated, published and approved?