Save it for your art...
There was a conversation on the omg.lol chat network, and it lit up an ADHD tangental spark that I almost just brain dumped into the chat... but it wasn't participating in a conversation.. it was grabbing the wheel and steering it down a side street.
So here's what I was thinking.
There is this existential issue that no one actually exists the way you know them to.
Aside: For some reason I love the Cave Allegory[1] because everything becomes a cave allegory when thinking about perception and human experience...
This is a generalistic view of the Cave Allegory, mainly focusing on assumptions and biases. We aren't taking into account the numerous problems that the conclusion of the original text gets in to ↩︎
Back to existential navel gazing: Every person you know is just the shadow. You are only getting the fuzzy outlines of a projection of what is happening for that person. You never have the ability to truly see the real person because there is so much going on internally that you will never understand because you've never lived their life, nor do you feel your existence the same way as anyone else.
But we spend so much time with our ego that we assume that shadow we see is their core self, and we then construct whole narratives around how we see that shadow behave. Because of course the shadow is the actual person... We know everything that is going on inside our heads, so when people observe us they have all that same internal information we have, right?
Living with Generalized Anxiety, I find myself spending more brain cycles than I would like on trying to analyze and tease apart what is actual versus what my anxiety is lying to me about. It usually is around what people are thinking of me, how I am being viewed, and what I've done wrong.
And to snap myself out of that, I remind myself that
- What I am seeing is not the full story, and I can never know the full story
- What I am seeing is being warped by my assumption that the shadow is the real thing
- What I am seeing is also being warped by my depression and GAD
- Every time I am worried, just talking to the person tends to resolve the fear
That last one is probably the most important one for me - don't isolate myself in internal stories of how I am bad, but instead reach out and lean on that shadow I am seeing, because there is a real person casting that shadow and even if I don't know the shape of what is casting it, it is just another person in the dark, reacting to shadows, scared of the unknowing.
Member discussion