You can be in a crowded room, but feel completely alone. It’s strange how odd you can feel in a stranger’s company, someone who views the world from a completely different angle, who aspires to a different lifestyle…..
If I’m with someone rather business-orientated, I feel like a little hippy girl. If I’m with someone who is even more free-spirited or alternatively dressed, I feel quite reserved / straight. If I’m with someone who seems more intelligent or more spiritual than I, I feel inadequate. Where is my sense of self, in these social situations? I imagine you choose partners because they have similar viewpoints, are at a similar stage of life or just make you feel more balanced, more like yourself and less alienated.
It’s as if your view of yourself changes when you are with different people ie: who show the same characteristics to extremes or are polar opposites. It becomes strangely relative to the situation, despite trying to remain true to yourself. Am I making any sense? I think I am currently having a slight crisis of confidence about who I am.
“That opens a fscinating discussion. We see ourselves – perhaps know ourselves? – in comparison with others. There is no left without a right, no faithful without unfaithful, no truths without lies. To define is to refer to what is not included within the definition, to exclude.
Our “self” is expected to be an all-supporting island floating in the middle of all of these currents, rock-steady and unchanging.
For those who stay in a narrow path, surrounded by a single kind of people, it is easy to know who the relative “you” is. “You” are the sensitive one, or the rational one. The artistic one, or the gifted one. The supporter or the supported.
But for those of us who swim freely in many milieux, it is not so simple!”
Hayden Foster
http://lyricflight.blogspot.com/