Epiphany

I’ve had a bit of an epiphany. Something that’s been bothering me for a long time is finally making sense. It’s fairly simple, too — the sort of simple that makes me wonder why I didn’t see it before.

For the longest time I’ve been struggling with what I feel is a large gap between how other people see me and how I see myself. Specifically, I felt like people were being way too generous with their opinions of me. If I heard someone speak about me, my mind kept paraphrasing Star Trek: First Contact: “This Aura you keep talking about? I never met her. I can’t imagine I ever will.”

I took this gap to mean one of two things; either I wasn’t being honest with myself, or I wasn’t honest in how I present myself. This bothered me, because I think it is important to be authentically me. But since I do believe humans are especially good at deceiving themselves, if I am indeed lying to myself, how would I know? And if I am being dishonest in presenting myself, how am I going to be more me than just being me?

As I was writing out this problem, trying to explain why I often feel over-valued, I realized that I felt people often assume my motivations for my actions to be much nobler than they actually are. But, that’s it. There’s the answer.

I did a quick informal poll and within ten minutes 5 friends replied that the motivations behind their actions define them more than their actions by themselves do. Taking a little more time to think about it, two more friends said ‘both’ and later still one friend said ‘actions’. I am going to call that as “Most people (like me) define themselves by their motivations more than by their actions.”

Here’s the thing I only just realized; I am the only one privy to my motivations. Everyone else can only define me by my actions.

I can be honest with myself, and be authentic in how I present myself, and still have other people get a different impression of me than I have of myself. I am the only one who has to live with my internal dialogue. Everyone else only sees my actions and has to deduct my motivation from their personal experience with me, and people in general. Sure, I can share my motivations with people, but they then have to decide how accurate the thing I share is. Amusingly, if I try to correct their deducted motivation more often than not the result is them adding ‘humble’ to their opinion of me. And that…is actually pretty humbling. It’s a weird dynamic.

My first memory dealing with this, was when I was 8 years old (see why I felt compelled to write this blog? This thing has been bothering me for 3 decades!) I was at my Catholic school. I was feeling lazy. It was early in the morning and I didn’t feel like starting my day. I was so happy when my teacher asked me to go get something from a different teacher. It meant I could put off starting the school day for a few more minutes. When I got to the class, I noticed they were just being led into prayer. Happy to put my day off even longer still, I waited outside the class, until I heard “Amen” and only then stepped inside to ask for the thing my teacher wanted. This second teacher had noticed me come to the door, had noticed me noticing they were praying, had noticed me step back and wait patiently until they were done. And decided to use me as a prompt for a lecture about how I was showing so much respect for her and her class by not interrupting their sacred time with God and how everyone should try to be just like me. There I was, in front of a strange class, blushing at being told I was such a good girl, while I knew the truth; I was just being lazy. I felt bad for making people think I was a much better person than I really am.

I can now finally give this incident, and many more like it over the years, a place. I am not wrong in thinking respect was not my motivation for waiting that day. But this teacher wasn’t wrong in thinking it was. Respect has always been important to me, and I’ve been brought up to respect everyone. Had I not been lazy that day, would I still have waited? I like to think I would have. Even if respect was not my main motivation for waiting, it very well could have been. My actions were not out of character.

I think people who have known me for a while, have an on-average opinion of me. And just like with every sort of average, that does not take the highs and lows into account. Those highs and lows in motivation, are something I will have to live with. But I should try not to let those define me more, than my actual actions.