Do We Have to Be Somebody?
Help! The person I’m supposed to be is taking away my freedom!
Have you ever found yourself writing and deleting the same message over and over while texting someone close to you, worried they might misunderstand?
“That actually hurt my feelings a little.”
No, too sensitive. Delete.
“No, it’s not really a big deal.”
That doesn’t sound very genuine either. Let’s add a smiley face. Maybe change the subject altogether.
By the time we finally hit send, there’s no trace of our hurt left in the message.
At least we’ve made it clear that we’re an understanding person!
But now we’ve also eliminated any chance that the other person might realise what hurt us in the first place.
We want them to understand us, yet we’re erasing the very part of ourselves they could understand.
Understanding. Strong. Easygoing. Intelligent. Independent.
When did we take on the responsibility of being this person?
Keeping watch over ourselves
Having an idea of who we are makes life easier. We use these ideas to explain what matters to us, what we’re capable of, and which of our behaviours make us uncomfortable. They help us set priorities and give us something of a guide to live by.
The trouble begins when the things we say about ourselves stop allowing for disagreement.
Psychologist E. Tory Higgins’s self-discrepancy theory examines the differences between how we see ourselves, who we’d like to be, and who we believe we ought to be. When these versions of ourselves drift apart, they can give rise to feelings such as disappointment, guilt, or anxiety.
In our message box, that tension fits into a single sentence:
“I’m hurt, but an understanding person shouldn’t get upset about things like this.”
When we think this way, we add another layer of discomfort to the original hurt: the discomfort of having been hurt at all.
If we tell ourselves, “I’m a calm person,” our anger might not seem particularly welcome. Yet recognising anger can be the beginning of understanding what we’re reacting to.
We don’t have to act on everything we feel. But if we silence an emotion before we’ve even listened to it, we may miss what it has to tell us.
An interesting tension emerges here: the adjectives we use to define ourselves can make it harder to get to know ourselves.
The person we think we’re supposed to be, that calm and composed individual, leaves no room for the part of us that gets angry.
But why is appearing calm and understanding so important in the first place?
The conditions of being loved
In Carl Rogers’s approach, conditions of worth describe how people may come to associate their sense of value and acceptability with meeting certain expectations.
When we feel that acceptance depends on behaving in particular ways, we may gradually begin to apply those same conditions to ourselves.
“If I don’t upset people, I’ll be loved.”
“If I don’t need anything, I won’t be a burden.”
These aren’t statements that explain everyone’s story. But they can help us understand why certain expectations we place on ourselves begin to feel less like choices and more like obligations.
If being understanding has become a condition for being accepted, admitting that we’re hurt can feel risky.
So when we delete that message, we may be doing more than avoiding an argument. We may be trying to protect our place in the relationship.
But that comes at a cost.
We want the other person to know us, yet we remove parts of ourselves from the equation before the conversation has even begun.
And our expectations of them are hardly any simpler.
The people we love should know what will upset us. They should find the right words without being told. They shouldn’t take advantage of our understanding nature.
While we’re busy playing our own role perfectly, we’re trapping them inside a role too.
There may be only two people in the relationship, but we’re living like a whole squad of ten.
And some of them are holding the others captive.
When the rehearsal goes on too long
Recognising these patterns doesn’t necessarily mean we can escape them.
Instead, we might start searching for the perfect way to express ourselves.
If we prepare the sentence a little more carefully, wait for just the right moment, eliminate every possibility of being misunderstood…
In Charlie Kaufman’s film Synecdoche, New York, theatre director Caden Cotard sets out to recreate life within an increasingly elaborate stage production.
As the representation of life expands, the boundary between living and staging it becomes increasingly blurred.
Watching the film through the lens of our question raises an interesting possibility:
In trying to represent ourselves with absolute accuracy, we might turn our lives into an endless rehearsal.
We prepare the conversation we’ll have, the reaction we’ll give, the person we’ll become.
But while the preparations continue, both we and the person we’re preparing to speak to are changing.
By the time we finally feel ready, we may already have become someone slightly different from the person we rehearsed.
If change is so ordinary, why does changing the story we tell about ourselves feel so much like losing something?
What if there’s nobody left?
If I don’t appear strong, will people still respect me?
If I’m not interesting, will anyone be curious about me?
If I stop trying to understand everyone, will they still love me?
Beneath these questions lies another one, alongside “Who do I want to be?”
“If I don’t appear to be somebody, what will I have left to hold on to?”
Our image can become more than a way for others to recognise us. It can also become a way of reassuring ourselves that we exist.
Psychologist Bruce Hood’s account of the self illusion opens another window here. He argues that what we experience as a single, unchanging self is a construction our minds create from our experiences and relationships.
This doesn’t mean our experiences are fake. It means we can question how the stories we tell about ourselves come into being.
From this perspective, “I’m a calm person” might describe us, but it doesn’t have to account for every emotion we’re capable of experiencing.
Getting angry doesn’t erase everything we thought we knew about ourselves.
Still, the advice to “just be yourself” doesn’t solve very much.
We can turn that into another assignment too.
Now we’re trying to perform the role of someone natural, authentic, and perfectly comfortable in their own skin.
The effort it takes to appear effortless can be exhausting.
So are we going to give ourselves yet another task?
“I must never hide anything.”
We don’t have to express every emotion or reveal every thought exactly as it appears in our minds. Sincerity also involves timing, consideration, and responsibility.
Perhaps the distinction worth making is this:
Are we changing what we want to say out of consideration for the other person, or because we don’t want them to see a part of ourselves that doesn’t fit our image?
Let’s return to the message box.
“That actually hurt my feelings a little.”
It’s still there.
We can add an explanation. We can choose another time to talk. We can send it, or we can wait.
But the fact that we’ve written that sentence doesn’t invalidate everything we know about ourselves.
An understanding person can get hurt.
A strong person can ask for help.
Even someone who knows us better than anyone else can discover a new side of us.
Maybe today, we can have a conversation without having to be a finished version of ourselves.
