Zest O! Zest! Why do you fade in discovering your inner self?

 Ladies, put on your shoes; it's time to face the rows.

Once I went to a marriage reception party, and I saw a very beautiful, fair, glowing bride. My heart fell for her glow. In the course of time, I moved out of the city for my studies. On one of my leaves, I happened to meet this bride again. I asked my mom, "Who is she?" and she replied, 'Wife of Mr. X?' Stunned, I stood there. The bride I saw was beautiful, fair, and glowing. This lady had a dark complexion that was no match for the beauty I saw on the day of reception. Practically speaking, I met two people, though both of them reside in the same body. This is the power of makeup, which transforms our outer selves exclusively. 

We all do these make-ups almost every day in order to hide our inner selves. 

We all love to live in this fallacy because we fear facing the truth about ourselves. Humanistic therapist Carl Roger describes this situation in his book "On Becoming a Person" as a threatening situation when we remove our mask and introduce ourselves. Let me simplify this more. We are all well acquainted with R. L. Stevenson's novels, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In this duet, Mr. Hyde was his real self, which was very bad and hence feared rejection. So he preferred to hide and enjoy life. Dr. Jekyll was the mask he wore to show everyone he was admirable and respectable. Dr. Jekyll was not at all happy until he was able to express himself as Mr. Hyde.

We all can live for a while with the mask, but the real self will raise its head to be expressed some day. Psychologist Carl Jung said that we all harbor our demons within us. He goes further, saying that some of our most important identities are in our darker minds. Similar to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he talked about shadows. Shadow is the repressed part of ourselves because it was considered evil. 

Secondly, we do not want to invite disruption. Let us revisit Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We all love to be me, the real me, just like Dr. Jekyll, who always wanted to be Mr. Hyde. As the story progressed and the secret tried to be exhausted, Mr. Hyde was left behind, and he did not want people to identify him as his real self. He had no strength to confront himself and accept himself as Mr. Hyde because this was a really bad look. The disruption grew so great that he committed suicide. Had he confronted and checked this massive difference in his inner and outer selves, he could have worked on it rather than killing himself. This reminds me of one of my own weaknesses. I am a very manipulative person. For years, I have been doing this to get my things done without knowing that I had it. As I started to explore myself for various behaviors that had been unappealing, I found out that I try to control and manipulate things a lot. From then on, I always observe my own actions and tell people that I am manipulative so that they can correct me when they feel I am manipulating them. This discovery was shocking but true. It took me time to learn to live with this gift. 

Thirdly, we fear change. We all know change is inevitable, but we still resist it. Similarly, when we explore our inner selves, we fear we will discover things that need to change, and we don't want to change. In my youth, I was a very straight-forward kind of person. I had openly pointed out the mistakes of many, and still things went wrong for me. This made me reflect on myself. I questioned myself for years in succession: "Why did things go wrong with me?" There was no answer because I was not ready to see what my inner self wanted me to show. In this course, I happened to read about emotional intelligence by Daniel Goldman. When I emotionally got connected to every move I had taken and tried to understand how the other person might be thinking or feeling, I got my answer. This incidence wanted a change in me, of which I was unaware. When I learned about emotional intelligence and accepted the change, I rediscovered myself. 

 

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