Gray on 20/6/2020 at 13:35

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Who are you, deep inside, underneath all the layers of what you try to hide?

Like everybody else, I'm a multi-layered person. Recently, I was prompted to try to describe my personality, so I tried to give a brief but clumsy description of the below, because I'm slow and thick, and I can't think on my feet. Here is what I should have said, now that I've had the time to think it through:


On the surface, I may look somewhat hostile, 6 ft tall, shaved head, always wearing black or grey, with a grumpy face. However, this is not anger, it's just that I live with constant pain of 20 years of CFS. I don't actively hate you, I just look like I do, and everything everybody does annoys me because it causes actual physical pain. But I try to keep a lid on it.

If you observe my behaviour, you'll find that I'm polite, considerate, humble and kind. I use words like "excuse me", "please", and "thank you". That's probably the most people will ever hear of me. I always step aside and let other people pass, be it a little old granny, playing children, a gang of loud teenagers or a mother with a stroller. I hold doors open. I wait for other people. I never litter. I do things the correct way. This is what I want most people to see. I try to behave as if I was a nice person. This is my thin veneer of civilisation and presentability.

But underneath that is a hard, thick shell of bitterness, cynicism, sarcasm, anger and fear. It's the accumulation of all my life experience, all the hard things I've been through, all the injustice I've faced, all the lies and deceit I've heard, all the violence I've faced. This is where my true anger lies. This is my armour. This is my core strength. This is my weapon. But this is also the part that I try not to show to people, it just sometimes creeps out. Whenever I say something stupid on TTLG, this it where it comes from. Sorry about that.

Buried deep, deep down, underneath that hard shell is something most people never see. The warm, loving, caring true self. The bit I can't expose for fear of getting hurt again. It sometimes leaks out through the other layers, but I try to stop it. I don't want anyone else to see this part of me, except for the most deserving, to whom I give everything. All of my love. All of that is me. This is what I'd like to think that I'm really like, I just don't want to show it.



Whether you've thought about yourself to this degree or not, I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who functions like this. There's probably been a lot of psychological research that breaks down people's personality traits into even more subgenres, and I've probably overlooked a few. This is just what I've come up with so far, in my own head, because I have too much spare time.


This brings me to my point: Have you ever had a deep, long, hard look at yourself, and if so, what did you find?

I'm not asking you to post your deepest darkest secrets here, just if you've ever thought hard about your own personality and how you behave. Are you a complete jerk? I know I sometimes am, but by accident. Do you deliberately antagonise people to prove a point? Guilty. Are you a racist asshole? I sincerely hope I'm not, but I need more data. Maybe I'm terrible, but I do try.

Please, do elaborate.




(and yes, this has been a long hard lockdown and I've had three bloody months to think about this shit)

Gryzemuis on 20/6/2020 at 14:52

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You should have started this thread on the "Member's Chat" forum. I'm not gonna write anything personal on a open public forum. (I've written some personal details here before, e.g. about my work situation. But I always delete that after a few days, after people have had a chance to read it).

The most noticeable thing about your description is that you write mostly about how you think others see you. Your appearance. And you write very little about how you see yourself. I think that is saying something about your personality. Maybe more than what you wrote yourself.

In comparison, I couldn't care less what others think of me (except friends, close colleagues, and other people you (have to) deal with often).

Tocky on 21/6/2020 at 02:29

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I'm not going to write anything personal on this forum... LOL. I think we all know who I am at this point. I'm the luckiest son of a bitch who ever lived.

Sulphur on 21/6/2020 at 05:40

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PigLick already made the post I intended to. Dammit.

All right, considering it seriously. Gray with the impossible philosophical question. Who is anyone? Are we all just Boltzmann brains constructing reality around us? What's a collection of neural impulses to do? Assign the labels, do the phenomenological teardown, work through the qualia to arrive at some approximate linguistic distillation of personhood?

Self-reflection's hard. I've done it at my lowest points. I didn't like a lot of what I saw. Do you ever self-reflect at your highest points? I haven't; I know the image keeps shifting anyway, so perhaps I should. But then are you really going to talk about it anyway? Some things are between you and the mirror alone. What's the beating core? There might be no simple answer. But I hope to god it's learning from old wounds instead of being crippled by them.

What I've learned is I can be kind one minute, an asshole the next, repentant yet unforgiving, and fuck if I know that it's not turtles all the way down. All I know is I'm bleeding and healing every goddamn day, and that's the truth of it.

Jason Moyer on 21/6/2020 at 17:01

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[video=youtube;o6Vg0ShasWQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6Vg0ShasWQ[/video]