Does anyone really know me?
The age old question, who are we?
As a child I was really obsessed with those teen magazines specifically those sections titled 'which friend in the group are you?' or even better 'which girls aloud member are you?' I badly needed to know who I was, especially who I was through the lens of other people. I thought it would help me to understand my character even better if I was pairing myself up with an already existing person, aligning my personality to theirs. I understood other people and so if I could look at someone even remotely resembling myself, maybe I could better understand who I was. Growing up I was always friendly and amiable to most people, I had a lot of friends. That sounds like a brag but trust me it's not. Throughout school I flirted with the idea of dozens of different friendship groups. Dancing around different people testing out who I best fit in with. Because I got along with everyone on a surface level this was easy enough, I could test out a group see if it felt right and maybe stay a while. I was friends with girls that loved boy bands, science, hiking, horses, makeup or singing. None of this really interested me but it was enough to experiment, to dip my toes into this personality. Trying it on like a hat in a shop. Just casually seeing if it suited me. I don't think I was intentionally doing this, I wasn't trying to bounce around this much. It just happened naturally. As I was unaware of who I was, it was natural to cling to people who were sure of themselves, desperately hoping their personality would rub off onto me. I wanted to please people, to make people laugh and make them happy. So mirroring their personality seemed like a natural way to earn their affection. Trouble with this and with well, all of that is that you not only develop zero sense of self, you also become addicted to basing whatever personality you have on pleasing other people. You learn how to say and do exactly what you think people want and not what you really want to say and do. Thankfully of course I grew out of this, eventually I found strong stable and open friendships that not only allowed me to be myself but that actively encouraged it. Naturally as you grow out of your teenage years you gravitate towards people with similar interests and lifestyles to you and so it's no longer as difficult to find 'your' people.
A lot of that comes from the comfortability of distance. When you're growing up you become friends with the people you walk to school with, the people sat next to you in science. The people from your primary school and who know your parents. It's not intentional and it's not a bad thing, but it is something when you start to realise the only reason you're friends with someone is because you've not known anything else. And this isn't to say those friendships weren't worthwhile and that you can't be friends with people you grew up with, of course you can. But you have to find other things that connect you, beyond basic geographical location. If you realise there are 1000's of other things you love about that person, tons of other things you have in common and you just love being with them then of course that's an amazing thing. However I think it's a particularly powerful thing when you start to realise you're not the person you want to be when you're with this person. It's a hard pill to swallow, but a brave lesson to learn.
When you find those people, your people the ones who really get you and you feel properly seen for the first time, it's an amazing thing. It's a hard thing to admit when a past friendship or relationship wasn't authentic, when you realise you weren't being yourself. Nobody wants to hear that the friend they had for years was being inauthentic. But it's something we all have to grapple with, letting go of those past relationships that didn't really fulfil us. I'm so lucky now in the friendships I have, cultivated through the last few years with kind, lovely and interesting people that understand me. I'm forever grateful for that. However when you think about the various identities you had at school, you think about how people must remember you and how different you inevitably are now. It's strange to come to terms with all of that and it's hard not to care. There are several people who I let down, who I abandoned or upset. I wish I could talk to them and explain I'm not a bad person, explain why I did those things and try to tell them who I really am now. But it's not my place to do that, those people don't need that explanation and they're allowed to have whatever opinion or perception of me they choose. How they see me is completely out of my control.
It's natural however to have these moments of self doubt and to wonder if anyone really knows you. Even those close friendships that have withstood the test of time or the people that would say they know you inside and out. Do they? Can anyone ever know you, truly unless they're living with you inside your mind? Surely even if you share every thought, every joke or worry with someone, they still won't know you fully. Can we expect that from others, to be known and seen so fully so completely? Should we need that? Is that other peoples responsibilities to actually know you this well. They have lives, jobs, loves, things to do and their own stuff to be thinking about. I think it's slightly selfish to expect other people to know everything about you, every detail or anecdote. Do we have to be known and understood to that depth for a relationship to be successful. I'm still figuring this all out, still trying to piece everything together and I don't know the answers to all of these questions. I think I just wanted to explore this because I found myself getting personally offended when friends forgot things about me or maybe categorised me as something that I wouldn't personally agree with. But I think these things aren't as important as we presume.
True friendships are about that connection, that loyalty and that willingness to listen and be there. I don't think a test of a persons knowledge on the 'topic of you' is a fair benchmark for a good friendship. And maybe we should stop expecting from other people what we can get from ourselves. Maybe cultivating a better relationship with ourselves, a stronger understanding of who we are and enjoying the time we spend alone. Maybe that's more important than expecting other people to be exactly what you want them to be.
I'm very sure of who I am now, even if there are misconceptions from other people. I know what I love, what I want to be, what makes me happy and the kind of person I am. I'm confident in my ability to understand myself. And maybe I am the only person I can expect that level of understanding from?
Molly,
xx
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