Thoughts as a Wallflower
Maybe everyone only has access to a fragment of our identity, including ourselves.
The idea of a wallflower deeply resonates with me: The world zooming out of focus; the details of faces morphing into a flurry of blurred edges; the voices shifting into a deafening whisper. Yet the smallest detail of behaviour magnified as I piece together patterns of behaviour like an uncompleted jigsaw puzzle.
As a Psychology major, I can’t help but psychoanalyse everyone around me. Maybe everyone does that too, but it just somehow seems too much, my head heavy with different interpretations of specific patterns of behaviour, like a detective piecing together the clues.
However, the obsession of observing others somehow does not apply to myself — I somehow can’t seem to piece myself together in a coherent way, the haphazard pieces pushing against each other as I uncover more and more.
Maybe everyone only has access to a fragment of our identity, including ourselves.
The circumstances you meet someone, their own concept of self, and the interactions with them lead to a unique concoction of a perception of you. Sometimes their perception of you could be outdated, frozen in time to when you first met them or were closest to them; after all, relationships don’t morph alongside you. And you find yourself struggling to break free from the identity sculpted onto you, like clay forced into its mould.
And it is in those moments where you start to think — is it worth breaking the friendship built upon years of time and effort from both parties; how much weight should the past friendship be given over the current dynamic of the relationship? Maybe there is no right answer to that; maybe you just have to trust your gut on whether someone is worth keeping; maybe the rule of thumb should be merely to do what makes you happy.
However, sometimes this misalignment in perceptions of yourself makes you question whether it was you all along — the misconstruction of your self-concept where you were merely viewing yourself from a pedestal. And suddenly, you feel the weight of your entire identity crashing down, the qualities you once took pride in crumbling at your feet, the weight pushing you down as your hollowness struggles to stand on its own. It is as if waves and waves of feelings of inferiority wash towards you time and time again, knocking you out cold, leaving your sense of identity in shambles, all alone.
But this process is necessary: knocking out those qualities you perceive yourself to have to start with a blank slate, to allow you to re-evaluate yourself as critically and honestly without any rose-tinted glasses. It is only when we shed ourselves bare that we can truly understand our needs and wants, our strengths and drawbacks, and take ownership of the identity we want to rebuild for ourselves.
Our identity and self-concept are a work in progress, and we need to embrace that. I hope we all find happiness in all our relationships, and if not I wish us the courage to walk away from those that bring us more sadness than joy. And ultimately, I hope that we do not feel fear or insecurity when our sense of self is threatened, but the strength to understand that it is perfectly normal not to completely understand yourself, and the courage to rebuild it again.