This is sort of a follow-up to my post from a couple of days ago. I’ve learned that if I state my intention to do a follow-up or a related post, it almost never happens. But if I had stated my intention, it would have gone something like this: “I have more to say about why it’s so hard for me to know how I feel in the moment, but I’ll talk about that in a later post.”

People say “Just be yourself” like it’s easy. Maybe it is for them, I don’t know. For me, the only time I can easily be myself is when I am alone, or surrounded by perfect strangers. If there are people around who I have any interest in at all, it’s as if little copies of those people appear in my head, and those copies all have wants and reactions and opinions, and they all get pretty loud. “Myself” becomes little more than a backdrop for all these other voices, and I can’t recover anything it might be saying until I’m alone again.

I don’t have any illusions about the accuracy of these voices. I’m not hearing what the people I’m with want and think, I’m hearing what I think the people I’m with want and think. Why my brain feels the need to construct these models, I have no idea. Well, okay, I have a few ideas, but no theories. And I can guess that it’s connected to several of the traits I like best about myself, like compassion and empathy, but it’s also connected to things I like much less, like lack of self-confidence and feeling like I don’t matter. It’s got its uses, but in general it really gets in the way of being a human being, which is something I’m trying to get better at, so I’d like to learn to turn it off.

I may have some strategies coming together. There are activities I do, like singing or spinning, that make me feel pretty solidly grounded in me-ness, and engaging in those before I go out helps a little bit. Taking a little time to think about who I am and what I want also helps… though again, not that much, because all it gives me is a laundry list to refer to when I’m actually in the social situation. It doesn’t help me connect more closely to the way I’m responding in the moment.

I had an epiphany, a few weeks ago, that has made a tremendous difference in my mental landscape when I’m alone. The epiphany was this: when I daydream about an interaction with someone else, the person in the daydream is also me. Sounds obvious when you say it like that, and also sounds kind of Jungian (it’s Jung I’m thinking of, right?), but it really hadn’t dawned on me before, not with that resounding gong of Important Truth. I do a lot of daydreaming, so that was good to realize (took less than three decades! Hurrah!) I think maybe applying the same idea to those copies-of-people that go shouting in my head will be similarly helpful: like, Hey Ginny, you’re not actually telepathic, so whatever the model in your head is saying must say more about you than about the actual other person, hmmm?

The tricky part is, I have to do that in real time, whereas when I’m daydreaming it’s just me and I have all the time I want. So I’m expecting it’ll take some practice. We’ll see.