When you and I don’t know each other, we don’t talk at all.
When you and I got to know each other but aren’t close, we exchange pleasantries but don’t go into depth about our personal life.
When you and I are BFF’s we talk about pretty much everything a friend can talk about.
When you and I become intimate we talk about everything there is to talk about, our vulnerabilities, hopes, and dreams.
This is a fairly simple thing to understand, regardless of who the other person is. There are two notable other parties worth pointing out: you, and the world.
What is your relationship with yourself? Do YOU talk to yourself about everything you’ll talk about with friends? Do you find yourself surprised you’re feeling or thinking certain things when you’re talking to a friend? That may be a sign that you’re not talking to yourself much.
With self-communication there’s another layer worth discussing, I think; it’s honesty. Of course, you can choose to be as honest or dishonest as you want when you’re talking to other people. You can choose to present your argument or thoughts in a certain way to another person to meet the situational context of the situation. This is technically dishonesty, but what you might call a “white lie”.
Being dishonest with yourself is a bit more nuanced I think. You can’t really think one thing and present to yourself another thought intentionally. Since I’m a vegetarian I can’t think “I’m a vegetarian” while eating meat (assuming that I’m past the point of deciding whether or not to become one). I can’t only receive the observable communication from me, I have to receive the observable and internal communication from myself. This means being dishonest with myself means I’m not looking into myself enough to know what I truly think.
My favorite topic to illustrate this: procrastination. I think I want to do it, but I actually don’t want to do it. Unless I can be honest with myself and actually come to the understanding of “Oh wow, I actually don’t want to do it” — trying to get myself to do something is going to be excruciatingly difficult.
So as someone who hasn’t been talking to oneself, how do you start talking with yourself? How do you open the can of worms, so to speak? Many of my clients are afraid to cross this invisible barrier of being honest with themselves and this just goes to show you how easy it is to neglect communication from ourselves.
Now what happens when we remove individuals from the equation and think about the WORLD in general? What is our opinion of everybody in general? This will somewhat demonstrate our optimism or pessimism about life. Depending on how you feel about the world, we will communicate accordingly with it.
If I have a deep secret I’m ashamed of, it’s one thing to tell a dear friend about it. But some deeper level of relief comes when we share that deep secret with the entire world; it’s almost like that deep secret’s power of shame loses a lot of its steam.
Maybe it’s because it feels so great to get something off of our chest. But I think of it more like this: when you open your heart to the world, it’s as if the entire world loves you in the deepest way. And nothing gives greater relief than that I think.
We like to live in a world that divides between introversion and extroversion. I think both directions need to be pursued. We must open our hearts to ourselves so we are honest and open with ourselves. We must also open our hearts to the world so we are honest and open with the world, with nothing to hide.
That is how I encourage you to take the spirit of pride into your life this month, regardless of your individual personhood. I encourage you to look at the emotional forces that suppress other people’s pride of themselves. I encourage you to go out and be proud of who you are. Without consideration of both, we may be perpetuating more shame or we may be dishonest with ourselves.
The nice thing is, you can practice doing both. Expressing your thoughts and feelings out into the world more often will give you more opportunities to look within. The more you look within, the more you will want to share with the world because you are in intimate love with the world.
Go out and express yourself, like a wildflower blooming with nobody watching.