The only thing you are is human. everything else you do.
You are not an introvert. You sometimes behave introverted
You are not clever. You sometimes have clever ideas
Etc
Don't let anyone tell you what you are. Even if you act like a jackass sometimes, that doesn't make you a jackass. it just means that you occasionally act like one. Some people will insist you are a jackass. That is just them having their turn at acting like one
.....seriously though....you have an interesting point...categorisation and measurement is often a prerequisite of control
'Oh would some power the gift give us, to see ourselves as others see us, it would from many a blunder free us, and foolish notion'- Robert Burns
I think worrying about how others percieve us is more related to us adapting our behaviour to conform with societal norms. On one hand no one wants to be an outcast but on the other hand all the great breakthroughs by people have been made by people NOT conforming
In terms of our individual happiness i guess it comes down to balance. Unfortunatley it can often mean that we have to have different personas for different situations; Perhaps the more that people have to do that and perhaps the further they stray from their core....values/self (I think thats what i mean here)...the more effect it will have on their mental state
I wonder with actors how with their malleable personas they can keep a sense of self; sometimes i think they struggle with this. Watching some actors being interviewed they seem uncomfortable in their own skin....i think Heath Ledger was like that and i wonder if his role as the joker was messing with his head
Daniel Day Lewis is a method actor and absorbs himself in his characters....once when he was playing Hamlet on stage during the scene Hamlet talks to his fathers ghost (if it is his fathers ghost!) he felt like he was talking to his own dead father...or something like that and i think for a moment the boundary between reality and make believe blurred....he couldn't complete the performance and left acting for a while to become a cobbler! (i mean there is no more humble position then mending the things people put on their feet!...total reversal of persona)
You can see it in Hollywood....many people there are clearly not happy and perhaps not grounded in reality
Who are we and why do we have to pretend to be different things....i think these questions are important concerning mental health
The book 'American Psycho' is very interesting as it represents someone who has no sense of self....they have grown up in such a vacuous and meaningless environment where everything is so fake that they have no center...no point of reference. Here is a very disturbing passage from the book:
‘There was an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though i can hide my gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable I SIMPLY AM NOT THERE. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a non-contingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference towards it, I have now surpassed. I still though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet i am blameless. Each model of human behaviour must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and i do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact i want my pain to be inflicted upon others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this, and i have countless times, in just about every act I’ve committed, and coming face to face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing...’
Another story from New York is 'Sex and the City'.....i think the TV show is a complete twisting of what the author was trying to say....she wasn't trying to say that life should revolve around buying shoes, drinking cocktails and having meaningless chat...she was saying that that life leads to emptiness and lonliness......the TV producers have hijacked it and turned it into a consumer paradise (nightmare!)
I remember watching something about Marilyn Monroe about when she went to get help...emotionally. I think she had been a country girl who went to tinseltown and was catipulted into stardom. Suddenly she was living in a fishbowl with the world watching her and her life splashed on the front covers of the newspapers...she lost touch with reality. Anyway she got help from some psychiatrist who took her back to his house every night so that she could sit around the table with his family and just eat dinner in a normal environment....she had no point of reference of normality to anchor her ego to.....very sad really
‘All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why’- James Thurber
When reading biographies about high achievers i am often struck how their driving force often comes from their demon. By 'demon' i mean some individual quirk which has arisen from the interweiving of their nature and nurture...perhaps an event or series of events that has happened to them. They often strike me as unbalanced and often unhappy people. When they achieve their goal there is no sense of lasting satisfaction only a brief high followed by a depression which they must counteract with another high.
I think peoples demons can get them into trouble but can also give them great strength and i think it helps the individual to recognise their own demon and to come to terms with it.
