Photo by Dominika Roseclay
Ever been so excited to finally do something, that for whatever reason, you break out of character to reveal your unfiltered self to complete strangers and spark an awkward moment?
I'm calling this being high on life because for me it only seems to happen when I'm really happy about a thing, forgot where I am, and become who I am.
It takes quite a bit navigating the circumstances that is life; especially the part where you’re learning who you are, your likes, and your dislikes.
You must discern for yourself where these things range on a completely inferable acceptability scale: a scale dependent upon time, climate, culture, sand, rearing (you know, habitat). Then, dial everything in after acquiring enough social filters through your excavation of said region.
This is dependent upon your success at how talented you are at picking up on things in order to adequately fall into that range agreeable to the local natives.
The person that I am at home and the person that is met in public are not quite the same. Almost sounds like a serial killer, right? It's always fun proving that you're not one of those.
However, at a certain point in age you have probably heard it joked about that people tend to have three selves, because when you are surrounded by strangers you just can't know whose watching.
The public self is refined and crafted by all those social filters that exist because we don't trust each other; but, to be passable citizens we perhaps create an air of trust, some equivalent to nature's masking signals to outmaneuver deeply ingrained defense mechanisms in order to promote a sense of ease. This might even be called charm.
This public self branches out into those extensions of who we are at work, at the bar, in a gym, school, and so forth. We don't necessarily learn to lie but we craft convincing enough truths, something believable, hence the term representative.
Then we have our family selves. As the name implies I imagine a lot of filters vanish the moment we get through our front door; and maybe another set engages like our being a parent filter, or our being a sibling filter. But home is home and not everyone gets the chance to meet that person.
Then, there is the private self and if we are lucky we find a mate to share that self with because otherwise they would never be seen.
If this brings to question the phrase "just be yourself" consider how much this is asking and how brave (or how liberating) it is to risk ignoring public scrutiny, chance being taken advantage of, and have your sensibilities questioned for the accident of being different, trusting, and helplessly naive.
On the plus side, if we do somehow master the public self (this is excluding the diabolical and plotting personas which makes all that necessary), the world is in for something special that can only be brought about by your unique, remarkable, and quite perfect self.