When I go out to dinner at a nice place, I wear a suit and a tie. When interviewing for a job I have my favorite button-up shirt with my black and red tie. When I’m running I like to wear my gray adidas sweatpants and a white undershirt. I have an outfit for almost every activity in my life, it’s a way of representing myself in an appropriate way. Imagine showing up to work one day shirtless, with a belly button piercing whilst wearing a speedo, odds are it wouldn’t yield a very positive response in the office. We use clothes to present ourselves in an appropriate way for the situations that we are in, and much like with clothes, we do this with our personalities as well.
Truth be told, there are very few people who actually know me. I don’t mean this in a negative way, on the contrary. People don’t truly know me because the image I show, or the way I present myself, is not very truthful. It is by nature that we do this, we put on our “outfits” so to speak where we feel it is appropriate. The image that you present to others of yourself can be a lie, but I find in most cases it is just a bending of the truth. We tend to exaggerate our positive features, and downplay our negative ones. Personally I play up my humor and smile, to distract others from my true self, a much darker self.
Trying to explain image is so difficult in words because it can be so vague. We have many different images that vary drastically by relationship. You want your boss to see you in a much different light than you want that cute person in the front of class to see you. Presentation includes so many things as well from what we wear to what we let others know about our personal lives to who we associate with, image is everything.
I find myself lying so often about myself to others, putting on a good face or giving a fake laugh, sometimes it makes me wonder whether or not it’s really a good thing. When exploring this train of thought more, one inevitably comes to another question, and that’s whether or not it’s a good thing for anyone to tuck away who they truly are from others.
It’s nice having control over what others think of you, it brings me great comfort to know that others will only know the things about me that I let them know. We are by nature social creatures, it brings us great joy to be included and accepted by others. It’s possible that if we all stopped filtering what parts of ourselves go out into the world, then many will not be accepted by others causing great pain. Being socially ousted can cause great emotional pain, but in many situations it could also be genuinely dangerous. Many with differing views or orientations are in danger by letting those views be known. Many members of the LGBT+ community put out a heteronormative image of themselves for their own safety, if we decided that it was time we all stopped filtering our image, then those individuals are now thrown into a perilous situation.
I do believe that if we all let ourselves be our true selves all the time, then initially there would be chaos. The truth can be ugly, and the truth can be shocking. Many with hateful ideologies keep it to themselves for fear of being a social outcast, these hateful views would come to light. Many with differing sexual orientation and gender identification will come out and most likely in greater numbers than anticipated. I do believe however, that once the chaos dies down, we will reach an equilibrium once again. I just wonder, once equilibrium is reached, will the world be a better and more accepting place, or a place more divided than ever before. Nobody can really know, but I think that it’s contingent on how different we all truly are. I fear letting others know how ill I truly am, for fear they won’t understand, and will treat me a way I wouldn’t like to be treated. However, if we were all totally honest, I may come to find that we all feel this way, and I would feel more connected to others than ever before.
I think right now it is best for me to keep up my image of a happy person. One day, society is going to reach the point where it can handle the shock of honesty, but I don’t believe that now is that time. As a collective, we just aren’t yet accepting enough, and I don’t believe we would be able to properly jump into being truthful all the time. There are no half measures here, if half of us were truly honest with our personal image, and half were not it would be a society torn. I therefore believe that the worst case scenario is being honest with others, when others are not ready to handle it. Since I believe that we all have more similarities than differences, I think if we all decided to be honest with the way we present ourselves, then it would grant society the best outcome. For now however, we must work towards tolerating each other before we can take any major leaps into finding out about everybody’s true self.