To this day, I feel like there's something that's just not right about me and the choices I make. I constantly struggle between choosing what I want to be versus who I really am or what I think I should be. I feel everyone is living in their own personal utopia and the imperfections of my life and choices are obvious and that everyone was handed a script at birth on how to live.
Even as I write this article I'm sitting on my bed in my room eating crackers, feeling what I "should" be doing is talking with my friends. It's all too easy to forget that every human being I encounter is dealing with similar troubles and anxieties. We all have our "shameful" sexual fantasies, hidden pangs of envy for others' successes and fears of our future failures, but we keep these feelings to ourselves, brushed under the rug of the belief that we are alone in our struggles.
When I tell my friends and family about my troubles, I think that I'm sharing my personal plights with another human being who is not flawed and readily sees my imperfections as I do. And yet, I am the same human being that looks perfect and sees flaws in others as they see them in themselves. It's nearly impossible to fully understand this in our daily lives. The universe, in a sense, literally revolves around "me." Any reality I don't see doesn't exist. I cannot inhabit someone else's consciousness and when my consciousness dies, the only reality I'll ever know dies as well. René Descartes said, "I think therefore I am," meaning the only reality we can be sure of is our own. It's a natural consequence of our limited perceptions that we cannot fully see the complexities and secret absurdity of the world around us. So we can't really blame ourselves for thinking we are constantly in the spotlight of other people's eyes.
Of course, people form an opinion of us, but those opinions hardly mean anything and are always based on seeing a person from a single facet. I don't like one of my professors, I think she lacks conviction and sense of direction for the class and she sometimes doesn't wholly respect student's comments (speaking from personal experience). But one day her husband, another professor, came to speak to the class. I saw the adoration for him when he spoke and the excitement she felt when he smiled at her. I then realized that she doesn't know how to teach the class – not because she's "bad" in some way, but because she, like all of us, is filled with ambivalence and seeks acceptance despite our faults. So I should probably say I don't like her behavior rather than her being. We all have our high peaks and deep valleys, it just takes a brave explorer to see both.
