CharityFunDay wrote:
"Just being yourself" is rather useless advice, really.
For a start, each of us has as many social 'selves' as there are people who interact with us.
For a second (and more importantly) "yourself" varies due to the social chemistry you experience with another person.
A relationship, however ephemeral, is more than the sum of its parts. It's like trying to tell hydrogen to be xenon.
Yes (to the part I underlined), I'm a slightly different version of myself depending on whom I'm interacting with.
Each separate individual evokes a certain range of reactions and disclosures and conversation from me,
so I cannot say I'm some unitary self who is just one single way (behaviorally or mentally).
I face this quandary regularly: "how much of myself dare I be ?", out in public amongst strangers, on a dating site or the internet in general, etc.
I don't have answers, though-it's a perpetual "balancing act" that I have to struggle with and renegotiate every day, and I'm never sure how well I'm doing.
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*"I don't know what it is, but I know what it isn't."*