My Support Forums - View Single Post - So done with the Smoke and mirrors ...Rant

kennyc · Sep 06, 2015, 11:22 AM

This may or may not fit here as it is not strictly bipolar related, but much of this thread seems more general than particularly bipolar related.

I've pretty much always felt like an impostor, wearing masks all my life, even feeling like I was 'born into the wrong family.' During therapy many years ago and through subsequent self-examination I came to realize how I had ( or at least felt as if I had) been mostly a puppet whose strings and masks were being controlled by those around me. I made a decision to try and become myself, to drop the masks as much as possible (as others have said they are sometimes necessary in some situations) and be true to myself.

Interestingly after reading the posts here I also ran across an article at Wait but Why by Tim Urban concerning the topic of 'masks' and what other think and why you should stop caring what they think. It's a good article. I'm a bit unsure whether to just post here or if it's worthy of a thread of its own. Here's the link:

Quote:

Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think

By Tim Urban

Part 1: Meet Your Mammoth

The first day I was in second grade, I came to school and noticed that there was a new, very pretty girl in the class—someone who hadn’t been there the previous two years. Her name was Alana and within an hour, she was everything to me.

When you’re seven, there aren’t really any actionable steps you can take when you’re in love with someone. You’re not even sure what you want from the situation. There’s just this amorphous yearning that’s a part of your life, and that’s that.

But for me, it became suddenly relevant a few months later, when during recess one day, one of the girls in the class started asking each of the boys, “Who do youuu want to marry?” When she asked me, it was a no-brainer. “Alana.”

Disaster.

I was still new to being a human and didn’t realize that the only socially acceptable answer was, “No one.”

The second I answered, the heinous girl ran toward other students, telling each one, “Tim said he wants to marry Alana!” Each person she told covered their mouth with uncontrollable laughter. I was finished. Life was over.

The news quickly got back to Alana herself, who stayed as far away from me as possible for days after. If she knew what a restraining order was, she’d have taken one out.

This horrifying experience taught me a critical life lesson—it can be mortally dangerous to be yourself, and you should exercise extreme social caution at all times.

Now this sounds like something only a traumatized second grader would think, but the weird thing, and the topic of this post, is that this lesson isn’t just limited to me and my debacle of a childhood—it’s a defining paranoia of the human species. We share a collective insanity that pervades human cultures throughout the world:

An irrational and unproductive obsession with what other people think of us.

Evolution does everything for a reason, and to understand the origin of this particular insanity, let’s back up for a minute to 50,000BC in Ethiopia, where your Great2,000 Grandfather lived as part of a small tribe.

Back then, being part of a tribe was critical to survival.

....

Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think - Wait But Why