Who ARE you?
A missive on self identification, internet mutuals, and the people we think we are.
It has happened to essentially all of us, at some point in our adult lives, that someone poses the icebreaker question - tell me three interesting things about yourself. Queue an existential nightmare, a vision of your tiny self dressed as a 1930’s bank clerk, rummaging the file folders of your brain for answers: who am I! What do I like! Am I interesting! Do I know three things about myself! And eventually, after what feels like 10 minutes, but is possibly 30 seconds, you prattle out an answer involving your favourite colour, your pet, and possibly a cuisine.
It should not be this hard to get to these answers from the deep recalls of our minds, the panic sets in when we need to form an impression to these strangers. The desire to cast a “good impression” has been hoisted onto us from an early age, and until adulthood, has formed a good chunk of how we perceive ourselves and how we want others to perceive us. This isn’t meant to be a regurgitation of scientific studies, I am not a psychologist, these are just some opinions from a person who has given up on good impressions - because regardless of the impression, people will always find ill intention.
How we express ourselves, particularly on the outside, has always been a point of contention for everyone - even the most confident, cocky, person has experienced the deep need to create an image, not just present the one they’ve got. Those who haven’t are probably deeply disturbed people. I wasted much of my adolescence trying to manufacture an image of myself that conformed to how I wanted to be seen on the outside - and just that, it was a waste. I was never comfortable in my skin, always feeling like the off-brand cereal on the second to lowest shelf in the supermarket - a cheap imitation, with something that smacked of “vaguely foreign.” It took me until my early 20’s to shed the skin of trying to be someone else, with embracing who I am, regardless of the levels of stress and discomfort I felt being me - because it hurt LESS than trying to be someone else.
Eventually, you put up walls. You create an outward image of yourself, a tulpa, based on who you actually are, without revealing the soft fleshy innards of the best stuff underneath. Your mutuals will “know everything about you.” These people wish you happy birthday like clockwork. You’ll overshare on social media that you’re having the worst period of your life, that you’ve been ghosted by three people this week with a screenshot of the texts they sent you without allowing for a conversation, the name of your cat, that he peed all over your comforter, that you slid into someone’s DMs and maybe succeeded at it, a chorus of “yasss queen”s in congratulations - personal details, but none of which tell people about who you truly are as a person. You’re half naked, in lingerie, open to all of the internet, but no one knows what brings you joy. The worst part, is that letting people in, becomes the emotional equivalent of war criminal torture.
Once you let someone in, you expose the soft bits of yourself, the ones you reserve for those you trust the most and care for deeply, with the understanding that they are caring for you in the same way you are caring for them - mutually, not transactionally. The real you begins to emerge out of the cocoon, the hopes and fears and stresses and small details of the things that make you whole, and from there, trust and connection starts to build outside of the superficial. Always on edge that letting too many things slip out will endanger you, and will inevitably put you in the position of being hurt. It is the nature of being human, of protecting ourselves, and yet we engage in the process anyway. You begin the process - you tell the first person that you feel inadequate because you cannot contribute as much as others, or as aggressively, that your biggest fear is being alone, even though society conditions you to believe that you don’t need anybody, that your favourite shade of green is a medium soft sage that the seedlings have before maturing into a whole-ass bush.
But, is that the real you? And who is it that you think you are - are you reconciling those people together? The answer is yes, and no. It is as real as I want to be with people who think they know me, or want to know me, or what I want them to know of me, but it isn’t the person I exist as in the real world, my internal-external self. That self is tucked away for those I have created bonds and connections with that transcend the superficial levels of knowing people we’ve developed these days. I hope to one day share that person with someone willing to stick it out for the long haul - to grow that person with them, to merge the tulpa with the human. But for now - this.