Weddings are an interesting idea.
I'm not talking about the idea of getting married, I'm talking about this social obligation to interact with distant family and complete strangers. I suppose that's why people drink so much at weddings. It helps to loosen up and become more sociable, while also allowing for a good time. But what does a wedding mean to the average individual? The average person wants to impress others with their own life and yet not come off as a show off or full of themselves.They want to learn about how everyone else's lives are going while silently judging everyone based on appearance and short interactions with each other.
In short, you have to basically give your own eulogy at a wedding only you're not dead. What we don't think about is that at each wedding we build the perceptions that others remember us by. We build ourselves up to be this calm, cool, and collected person on the way to major success. We put on this act of the person we want to be. How often are you at a wedding and you think about how the other person is doing in life? You really only know about where they work, if they're in school, and if they're in a relationship.
It could be that I'm just not close to my family and I don't really hear about how the rest of my cousins, aunts and uncles are doing. In fact, I'm a little jealous about ethnic families because I feel like they are a lot closer between distant relatives. I have a mostly Irish family so its's not exactly normal to let others know if you're struggling.
The reason I'm writing about this is because my sister recently got married and I got to see a lot of my family that I haven't seen in four years. I was thinking about how we walk into these situation with a list of pit falls in our lives that we know to avoid or not bring up at all. In an Irish wedding you only focus on how well your doing and tell them that you have these big plans for success and change in the near future. In reality, all these plans you have are incredibly uncertain and even stressful to think about.
I don't know if this feeling is common with a lot of people or if I am just a stressful person but for me it is very easy to come off as fun and confident and charismatic. The truth is that I'm not that confident, I'm socially capable and charismatic but that isn't exactly the real me. Honestly, I just want to be more real with people. I want to be able to tell other people that I have fears about the future that sometimes keeps me up at night. I want to tell people that I don't really know who I am in life. I learned to appear confident from a few people in my life who told me that if you act confident then you become confident. This has helped me a lot become the person I want to be, but I'm not the person I want to be yet. If I can experience the world and settle down with a knowing that I am proud of my accomplishments then I can be happy. The problem is that I haven't accomplished that much yet and I'm full of too many self doubts.
I'm sorry reader that this started as a piece about weddings and turned into me rambling about my own self doubts, but I feel like this has really helped me be more real to myself. In the end maybe I just need to be more real to myself so that I can be more real to others.
