It's been asked before "How well can you ever really know someone?" No matter how close we get to other people, there may always be something that we hold back from the world that's only for us. Some might call these secrets and maybe they are, but it's more just something we don't reveal.
When we meet someone for the first time we tend to only show a fraction of ourselves. In a job interview we put on our best professional face and try to convince strangers that we're capable of doing good work. On a first date we try to show the other person that we're interesting and do our best to hide our craziness. It's only after we get to know someone that we start to let our guard down a little bit and pull back the curtain to show more of ourselves. For each person this process may be different. If you're like me, it takes a long time for me to feel comfortable around someone to show them more of who I am. Until then I may keep things a bit more on the superficial side. Others may just throw it all out there right away and if the other person hangs around then they become friends. If not, then they both go their separate ways. I suppose that second way is pretty good because you get all the pretense out of the way and save some time not having to deal with people who don't like the "real" you.
Do you ever find yourself behaving differently around different people? For instance around family you may be more reserved, but with your close friends you're the one ordering the fourth round of shots and suggesting base jumping into the reservoir. Does this mean you're hiding your true nature from one group? Or are you taking on a persona to match the expectations that were set long before? I think we tend to put labels on just about everything. So instead of being a fully formed person with complex dreams and ideas, we're put into categories like Mother, Son, Husband, Friend, or Co-Worker. That label becomes an idea about who a person is. Your parents were people before you were born. They had a whole other life before you came along, but we only know them as Mom and Dad. As a child our world view is very limited so we only know what we see. There comes a time while growing up that you start to get a sense that your parents are not the masters of everything they do. In fact they're often just trying to do what they think they're supposed to in order to keep you alive. It's not until much later that we start to see them as people. That label starts to slip off a bit. Sure they'll always be Mom and Dad, but hopefully they'll be a little bit more fully formed as people to us.
We can lose ourselves in labels. Talk to a parent who no longer has any children in the house. Sometimes it's hard to know how to deal with the world because for so long you've looked at it from a specific role. Once that role is complete there may be a huge question mark as to what comes next. They will always be a parent, but that's no longer the primary aspect of their life. The same thing can happen when any relationship ends. After a break-up or divorce people have to start seeing themselves as something other than a boyfriend or a wife. The label that's been put on us may not be all that we are, but it certainly colors our perception of ourselves.
You may have heard about someone going to go find themselves. For a long time I didn't know what that meant because I couldn't understand how you'd lose track of who you are in the first place. The older I get the more I see how it's possible. The dreams you may have had as a kid take a backseat to necessity. Life may not take you where you wanted it to and before you know it you're off living a life that you didn't intend. The person you were or wanted to be may go dormant. I'm not sure if that old self is always there or if the transformation to your current self essentially erases what you used to be. I guess that becomes part of the search to see if you can ever bring back who you were or who you wanted to be. In some regard we may have hidden our true nature from even ourselves. So I guess the question is who are we really?
