The cavity

My wife always tells me that I think too much, but when she told me that again a few days ago, she added a new twist. Sometimes I should just do what I feel. I immediately thought about the times when my instincts were screaming at me to do something and the rational part of me stepped in and convinced me to do what I thought was best rather than what felt like the right thing to do. I have spent my life silencing the part of me that goes on what just seems right. I have willingly given up my feel for live in order to run everything through some kind of thinking process. It's not necessarily a rational process. Making sure that I'm not doing anything to put myself out there, to expose some vulnerability or giving somebody else a chance to make me feel bad about myself is what the thinking part of me always does. It's like a pathological need to always do what fits with my long held (and almost entirely unexamined) notion of who I am and how I should interface with the world.

It's really depressing for me to realize that a huge part of that unexamined idea of who I am is basically that I'm not worth other people's time and attention. I can't be friends with that person or share more about my thoughts and feelings because I just don't offer enough substance for somebody else to really want to engage with me in that way. Because I have no real regard for who I am just as I am, I give other people total control in determining how I should feel about myself. It makes sense that I don't trust myself to follow my feelings when I don't really hold myself in very high regard. All my thinking is me trying to come up with a way to trick the person I'm dealing with and get them to see not who I am but who I want them to see. If they saw the real me they would immediately lose interest. So when my feelings told me that somebody was interested in me, my mind would immediately say that that can't be right. Why would somebody be interested in me. I must be looking at this situation all wrong.

This view of myself does a pretty good job of explaining some of my more undesirable behaviors. My passivity is not a consequence of an absence of motivation, it's more an outcome of not feeling that my needs are worth other people's time. It's better for me to know what they want and try to be that rather than actively showing them who I am and letting them decide if that's something they like. I don't deserve the things I want when it comes to other people. Non-people things, on the other hand, are fair game. I can go after those things with plenty of zeal, especially when they reinforce the image that I want people to see when they interact with me. All that other stuff, where I went to school, what I studied, how many degrees I have, what kind of training I've undergone, might make up for my lack of real substance.

At the core, all these problems are really just a belief that my preferences and needs are not valid. The judgement of others is more important than any judgment that I make. My reading of a situation, especially when it comes to my relationships, can never be right. I don't get people, I don't understand these things. I have to be eager to please so people will like me. They're acceptance of me fills the cavity of regard that I choose not to fill myself.