https://pixabay.com/illustrations/man-face-identity-self-me-i-am-510481/
I have sometimes spent part of a day or a week in silence. But I was not in seclusion, or anything like that. I just felt good not having to use my voice or any other instrument to communicate with others, and it ended up being a discovery of various nonverbal communication channels that we have at our disposal, but which we do not always see as true instruments of direct communication.
Loneliness is different. We may even be surrounded by many people, but silence may not even be part of that equation. We may be very active and interactive, but still feel alone.
But what then is authentic loneliness?
It is that loneliness that comes from our own acceptance as a person and as an individual. Without even a mask that we wear to the “mirror” of the soul when we seek the most intimate part of ourselves.
The act of seeking to stop acting toward others in a theatrical way, and discovering for ourselves that some of the interactions we had with people we thought were our neighbors and even close friends were just mutual acting, without real interest in the other, leads us to seek acceptance of the person we are.
It is not an easy move, as it can lead to isolation. But is it really isolation, or an opening up to our inner selves?
Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology as we know it today, postulated the following:
“The most frightening thing is to accept yourself completely.”
Carl Gustav Jung
In this statement, Jung manages to convey the profound psychological confrontation of standing naked before ourselves! Everything is exposed: our insecurities, our flaws and sins, and even all the aspects we want to hide from others, and even from our present consciousness.
Vulnerability appears dressed in a terrifying image, which arises from the collapse of the house of cards that was our constructed self-image.
All our fears, desires, and imperfections that we wanted to hide from others, from society, and from ourselves... Our image, which has been rebuilt and remade throughout our lives, like Frankenstein, in the image of a true patchwork quilt, in which none of the pieces are truly ours, reflects the idealization we make based on
social expectations and public and even our own judgments.
The fear of not being authentic, imperfect, or someone who is not worthy of love from others, or from ourselves, often leads us to be terrified of attempting personal discovery.
The journey is not pretty. We see many things we didn't even know we had inside us. But believe me, in the end, we will be much more true to ourselves, and especially to others.
Can true liberation and personal fulfillment only come from such an intimate exercise of “purging”? The whole process is long, and can even take a lifetime, and even then we may not succeed. But enormous courage and self-compassion, as well as an inherent search for oneself, can guide us through such a long and hard adventure.
We will realize that many of the interactions we had with others were only accepted, not for who we truly are, but for the role we proposed to play in this theater that is life.
Free image from Pixabay.com
Translated with DeepL.com (free version) - selected in the Advanced tools
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