Categories: uncategorized
Date: 12 September 2006 23:32:13
I realized why I like company so much.
And it's because when I'm with someone else I can avoid being with myself. My wife often complains that I'm unbearably miserable until someone else comes to visit or until I'm with someone else, and that then I become happy and funny and bouncy and all other sorts of things that are (in small doses) easier to bear than misery. I'd long ago realized what was going on there was that I am, by default, unbearably miserable, but that I simply wouldn't dare inflict that side of me on many people or, perhaps, on anyone who hadn't gone to the extent of marrying me. (It's all because of my childhood....). I knew that the happy, funny, bouncy face that I put on was fake and a cover. But what I hadn't realized was that I prefer being with other people partly because I have to put that fake cover on, because that saves me from having to put up with my real self. The cover fools me (even if it doesn't fool anyone else) into not seeing the grim side underneath, or at least it distracts me from it so it doesn't impinge on my consciousness to such an unpleasant degree.
What I can't quite reconcile with this is my firm belief in faking as a way of changing. I remember hearing ages ago that when you smile it changes the pattern of blood flow to your brain in a way that actually makes you feel happy. That's probably a load of rubbish, but the idea that a superficial change can actually provoke a deeper change rings very true to me. And yet my faking it all the time doesn't seem to be making me any happier. Or perhaps it's just past my bedtime.