What Stops Us From Being Ourselves – Penniless Parenting

Regardless of whether it is good or bad, it teaches us to conform.

Rejection: The Ultimate Fear

While being accepted is one of our greatest desires, being rejected or mocked is our greatest source of dread. This dread and the subsequent conformity can appear because of various reasons:

Our Low Self-Esteem

Whether you have always felt bad about yourself or someone made you insecure, you feel like you don’t deserve to be loved. Social media threads are filled with people who confess: “If they see what I am really like, they won’t love me anymore.” This is often rooted in shame or guilt that someone has “gifted” to us.

Unwanted Loneliness or Isolation

There are times in life when we are unwillingly put in isolation, with no one to keep us company. It can be a move, a switch of jobs, or even something more traumatic, such as losing one’s support network due to conflicts or public rejection. We might unintentionally try to fill in this void by being too agreeable. No one wants to feel lonely, and this is our attempt to be understood again.

Past Experiences

We all have those unpleasant past relationships that made us feel inferior. This is something that we may carry with us for a long time, even spending years on therapy or reliving the painful moments that have ingrained themselves into our memory. Someone had a toxic partner or parents who made them always walk on eggshells to avoid conflicts. Others have cultivated a persona of being popular, quiet, or likable for so long that daring to be someone else feels impossible.

Mask As a Survival Mechanism

We have already discussed the role of survival in our behaviors, but let’s delve into how we form masks and why they become our new identity.

Masks don’t just appear out of thin air. First, it’s a minor slip after slip in which we trade something (like our loud laughter, or our anger after being wronged, or our favorite old sweater) for something more acceptable. Then, there’s another one. It’s a gradual transformation, like a moss slowly growing on a tree. Little by little, we start editing ourselves.

It’s a false self, a persona we turn into to gain the approval of others. Sometimes, we even wear different masks for different people — we can be one individual with our friends, another one with our colleagues, and someone else with our family. It’s a clever strategy, but it can grow too all-encompassing. Over time, these masks become so well-worn that we start to believe they are our true selves.

That is why, over time, we often forget who we are, especially if we spend less time alone than with others. We aren’t always fake, of course, but it’s rarely the entirely genuine version of us.

We Pay for Not Being Ourselves

Even though we gain some benefits from being liked by the majority, we also pay dearly for losing our honest selves. Here’s what we face:

• Emotional exhaustion from performing
• Anxiety and depression from hiding our feelings
• Emptiness due to not fulfilling our own desires
• Always saying “yes” and ignoring boundaries
• Feeling unseen even in close relationships
• Losing motivation to do anything
• Disconnecting from oneself.