But those things don’t matter. Those things aren’t what people want to see. It’s not what I want people to see of me. Those things I won’t tell. Won’t show. I don’t think I am lying about myself. Perhaps I am, but what am I to do about that?
There isn’t a single person alive that shows every single person they meet the same version of themselves. You can easily see it in the people around you. And that is just context, environmental factors, the change that occurs from observation, a change that depends on who is doing the observation. That’s not lying, that’s just physics of sorts. Of course that is over simplified, but that’s a valid way to get a point across, many times.
Students act very differently when in the presence of their teachers than when they are on their own. There is a different version of that student depending on the people who they are with. With different other students they present different sides of themselves. The aspects presented to a teacher if asked a question is different than those when they’re just in the vicinity of the teacher.
That doesn’t mean that all students are multiple people, or that any one aspect of what they present at different times is the one true them. Perhaps parts of those personalities and attitudes presented in different circumstances are ones that feel wrong or that have never been present before. Perhaps there are parts of those personalities that are part of all of your personalities. But it still means that there are many things that influence the way a person presents themselves in different company, whether that’s a good thing to them or others or whether it is a bad thing. And certainly not all of those differences are lies.
My dad once told me about a conversation he and his friends had when he was in college, about whether a characteristic they had picked up from someone else, or imitated was a characteristic that they could claim as their own. They decided that at the point that that characteristic was common enough, when a person did it without thinking, or when its imitation was intention or had been given its own twist by that new individual, that it was it was theirs.
This was one of the first times I was introduced to the idea that you could change yourself. Not that you were not just who you were and that who you were was unchanging and automatic, but that you change.
You could change yourself for the better, if you wanted. You could identify parts of yourself that you didn’t like so much, and you could look for things you liked in others, and you could use that knowledge to be a person that you liked better.
It’s one of those simple ideas that doesn’t seem to be put into words that make sense very often. I’m sure there are many who’ve done it much better than I have here.
It’s also one of those things that’s much, much easier said than done.
It requires a lot of vigilance and awareness of what you’re doing, and that’s exhausting. If you have other things that require your attention, circumstances you can’t control but have to deal with, it gets much harder. Sometimes the progress you’ve made feels undone.
I don’t know whether it ever gets to a point where the progress stays, or whether the circumstances will allow for the progress to be faster. But I think it will, I believe it will. I hope it will. And maybe the hope is what makes it possible to put in that constant energy to make yourself a little better, bit by bit.