Good evening ladies and gentleman
Tonight, and not for the first time for what has been more than 4 years now, I pose a simple, yet remarkably complex question…
Do you know who you are? I mean really know yourself and go to the great lengths you might go to for someone you care for, someone you love in the same way you would to know yourself? What drives you? What causes you to feel pain? What makes you fall head over heels in love and laugh until your stomach hurts?
To truly know oneself, is rare. This is something that continues across to our relationships with friends, family, coworkers and even strangers on a crowded train. Think of your job for instance- think of what happened when you walked on your first day, think of how you felt, your demeanour, the way you carried yourself and even the eloquence of how you spoke.
Then think to three months later and how prolific the change ended up being. Think even of how your posture changed, not so nervous or uptight as the people you were spending the majority of your average week with became a group of people you were becoming more comfortable to be around.
You became more comfortable around these people, so you felt settled enough to remove some of the barriers you had placed around yourself in self protection. We all, not just at work- are surrounded by barriers. The employment contract you signed, often just like in life, comes with a candidate specification and we have all been led to believe through years of fearful obedience to a emotionally flawed and damaging system this is the person we must be in order to be successful.
When the truth is, when we play this character, this supposedly “perfect person” we feel cheated in the happiness it’s supposed to bring us, when the truth is nothing really changes.
However, as time passes with a never ending uneasiness, people will start to break away at those cast iron blocks around us, as we do theirs. We learn by listening, and share through the confidence listening gives us and from this you might start to remove more and more barriers, maybe the mask of the perfect candidate is revealed to show a sliver who you really are.
I wander, does anyone really know you? Truly know all of you. What you like and don’t like, what scares you, what makes your skin crawl and that nightmare you cant get away from sometimes when all you want is for them to hold you that much harder? In this world now does anyone every really know another person? How much of what we see is them and how much is simply our perception of them?
Perhaps perception is the wrong word. As you learn more about a person and they learn more about you, its seeing through the character they present to the world, the “perfect candidate” in turn for someone else, someone more recognisable to the person you look at in the mirror and complain at every morning.
So my question isn’t necessarily about people you now, your friends or lovers seeing through the character completely and without compromise, because a lot of the time, that sort of love is nothing short of a fantasy born from what the through the fear of losing it can do. It is about you. You are never going to be able to truly reveal your soul to someone, if you aren’t able to show yourself who you are.
Who knows you? Do you know you? Who is your perfect candidate?
Im not sure i do to be honest. Even if can’t help question the notions and beliefs of my Perfect Candidate- I’m not overly sure who he is anymore.
Yours, with love as always.
DR x
