The opposite of love’s indifference
–the Lumineers
Brene Brown did a TED talk on the importance of something I am coming to appreciate more and more: vulnerability. She started looking at what makes people feel connected, and why some people are more successful at it than others. Why some people are more satisfied with their relationships than others.
She started out studying connection, and out of that study she decided to do a deeper dive into the underlying factors of what made people feel more connected, more whole hearted, and what she came up with was that people who reported more feelings of connection also embraced vulnerability.
People who reported high levels of connection to their friends/family/world had somehow figured out that in order to be embraced for who you are you have to let people see that. Which terrifies a lot of us. Which terrifies ME. I spent decades trying to behave like what I thought a normal person would be like because I was sure that the person I am was not…right. Not good enough, too weird, too kinky, too intimidating, not enough like other people to be acceptable. I’ve talked about what that did for me before: it fucked me up, and it fucked up how I related to people. People can’t get to know you if you are acting like someone else.
You have to be willing to be who you are. And that is leaving yourself wide open. If you are pretending to be someone else and get rejected it’s OK because it wasn’t really you anyway. That’s what makes faking it so attractive. You figure you just weren’t doing it well enough, and try to improve your facade. In the process, of course, you eventually stop having any sort of intense feelings. Everything gets muffled. Comfortably numb, if you want to think of it in Pink Floydian terms.
If you are letting people see who your really are inside, it is painful to be rejected. It’s you. Really you. It hurts.
But.
It’s the only fucking way to have any sort of relationship with anyone that is real.
Can you be happy if someone loves who you’re pretending to be? A little bit. For a while. Pretending to be someone else is hard to maintain. Your body and mind work against you. All the time. It doesn’t feel right, because it isn’t right. It doesn’t feel right, either to you or to other people.
Eventually, you have to pay..or they do.