Just be yourself..
leafplant wrote:
He was right. But I like being myself and I like being myself so much that if being myself means I shall spend the rest of the days as a mad cat lady, than that's just how it is going to be.
I had this exact same drunken conversation in Prague the day this thread was created when I was there with a couple of university friends (although granted, as an aspie, I then spent two days by myself to recover).
The essential line of argument seemed to pivot on the fact that a) you make it easier for yourself not being yourself b) pretending to be someone else will give you access to relationship experience so you won't mess up a relationship with someone you actually care about and c) you need to hide yourself from someone so you have something to reveal. These all seem hideously contrived rationalisations of groupthink but watevs. I then incidentally expressed what was described the most cynical view on relationships they'd ever heard.
CharityFunDay wrote:
"Just being yourself" is rather useless advice, really.
For a start, each of us has as many social 'selves' as there are people who interact with us.
For a second (and more importantly) "yourself" varies due to the social chemistry you experience with another person.
A relationship, however ephemeral, is more than the sum of its parts. It's like trying to tell hydrogen to be xenon.
For a start, each of us has as many social 'selves' as there are people who interact with us.
For a second (and more importantly) "yourself" varies due to the social chemistry you experience with another person.
A relationship, however ephemeral, is more than the sum of its parts. It's like trying to tell hydrogen to be xenon.
Yes (to the part I underlined), I'm a slightly different version of myself depending on whom I'm interacting with.
Each separate individual evokes a certain range of reactions and disclosures and conversation from me,
so I cannot say I'm some unitary self who is just one single way (behaviorally or mentally).
I face this quandary regularly: "how much of myself dare I be ?", out in public amongst strangers, on a dating site or the internet in general, etc.
I don't have answers, though-it's a perpetual "balancing act" that I have to struggle with and renegotiate every day, and I'm never sure how well I'm doing.
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*"I don't know what it is, but I know what it isn't."*
