“Pieces of Self and the Process of Bringing it all Back”

Joe Kou

2/19/2012

For many years I have existed within a resistance to traveling to certain places and in general 'being in public' due to having suppressed myself and isolated myself throughout my life – where over time, I developed and kept feeding into a fear and resistance of being in the 'outside world' and participating in 'normal life'. My way of overcoming this was to create personalities and different 'versions' of 'me' which I would prepare and present myself as in order to defend myself from the fears and resistances that I had created within my mind. I discovered that by creating separate personalities within my mind and then 'stepping into' these personalities, I am able to interact with my world and suppress the fear and resistances – in this way 'at least' I was able to get around and get things done.

An example of this would be having a certain personality prepared in case I would encounter a being in my world that might ask me a question related to something that I have suppressed within myself and did not want to expose and would rather keep secret – I would thus create a 'backstory' and have excuses and justifications ready so that if I were to face such a situation I would already be prepared and would not be caught 'off guard' and would be able to maintain what I believed to be a social acceptance from other beings in my life. For every 'fault' that I saw within myself, or any point that I was ashamed of, I would have personalities and stories and excuses prepared for and developed the 'skill' of keeping my 'stories' straight as people in my world sometimes intermingle and I would have to 'manage' the relationships in ways that would allow me to continue the false personalities that I had sold myself as.

As I matured these personalities also evolved and became more sophisticated – along with the backstories and justifications that I had created to support the presentation of myself as I interacted with the world – continuing to suppress and hide and judge myself for 'being this way' while at the same time creating, feeding, and maintaining more and more fake personalities in order to 'fit in' and as I began to work and make a living to support myself, the personalities were also linked and connected to my survival within the matrix – wherein my ability to maintain my personalities became a part of my actual survival in this world.

What I have come to see within having lived in this way is that I have not in fact established ME as life and that I actually do not know 'how to be me' because for the majority of my life now I have only existed as these separate personalities – shifting like a chameleon from one personality/dimension to the next, constantly trying to 'hold on' to a sense of 'self' but never actually facing me and standing and expressing as me.

Now, looking at the relationships that I have created within my life I see that I have not actually gotten to know another person no matter how close I may have been to that person – because I have never actually gotten to know myself – I have rather been busy shifting from one personality to another always trying to survive and always trying to further suppress the points of pain, anger, frustration, hatred, jealousy that I have carried within myself, fearing to express those dimensions of myself and fearing to lose the perceived 'stability' that the relationships in my world seemed to provide – when in fact all I was doing was placing more and more barriers between me and my actual experience of myself in the form of friends and social interactions and professional relationships that supported my suppression and accepted/validated the false presentations of me.

It is not a pleasant realization – to self honestly see and investigate what one has buried and resisted and feared to face and seeing that due to not facing such points immediately and having the courage to live as who we are within self honesty in each moment, we end up looping ourselves constantly and continuously and eventually we become directed by and consumed by the very ghosts we tried to banish into the dark recesses of our minds, tucked behind the veneer of fake faces and personalities for fear that if we actually were to speak up and share ourselves and dare to actually stand up we would be rejected and cast out, not seeing and realizing that we are in each moment already rejecting and casting ourselves out – we are not allowing ourselves to see who we are in self honesty and we are not allowing ourselves to actually and practically heal the wounds we inflict upon ourselves within our self-dishonesty and self-separation. We end up as 'broken' people – beings composed of pieces and splinters and fragments of a life that was once whole, existing as several different fragments – each piece a remnant from some event or situation in our lives in which we did not trust the totality of ourselves as life and instead compromised ourselves – whether it is a 'little white lie' we tell to a friend to help them cope but not in fact assist them practically to face directly what was going on in their lives because we were more concerned with keeping the friendship than supporting the other person in facing themselves, to the moments where we knew we were abusing ourselves with destructive behavior but did not stop ourselves and simply accepted the abuse as who we are, or believing that we deserve such abuse and self flagellation, or perhaps we believed that there is something wrong with us as we compared our actual experience to the picture that we see in the world, not realizing that people just like us are likely holding on to the same pain, the same guilt, the same broken pieces stitched together as a presentation never actually certain of it's real expression because it is constantly broken down and rearranged to hide it's incongruities.

So here I am sharing and taking responsibility for my own point of having existed not as myself as the point of realizing that I have been hiding all my life from myself – and in this I have neglected the actual relationships in my world and have not established who I am. I am sharing this because I see that we do NOT have to exist this way and that we ARE able to release ourselves from the pain, from the secrets, from having suppressed ourselves for so long as the life that we all all. We do not have to judge ourselves for what we have done – we do not have to hide or feel ashamed for what we have become as a result of not facing ourselves and fearing to not be able to survive or function in this this world. We do NOT have to fear our own fear!

I am sharing this story of me because this story, unlike others that I have created in my life to support personalities with which to hide myself behind – is the actual 'story' of me as what I have accepted and allowed myself to become and what I am doing now that I have the tools and support to see myself, face myself, and change myself so that we no longer need to fear one another – so that we can begin to create a world in which no matter where we are, no matter whom we interact with, no matter what has occurred within our lives that caused us to give in to our fear and compromise ourselves, we can immediately stand up, speak, and share ourselves with one another and realize that nothing is ever personal – that we have, together, created a world based on suppression, distrust, and fear and that we are the solution by stopping that suppression, stopping the distrust, and stopping the fear that exist within ourselves.

How many of us have lived in this way our entire lives, believing that the only way to survive is to maintain the characters we must play in the relationships we have created as a reaction to a world system that does not support life equally? Let us stop blaming ourselves for what we have had to do to ourselves and each other in our fear for survival – stop regretting the lies and dishonesties upon which we have build the world as it exists today and the precious moments of life we have given up to our minds and personalities and fears and limitations and from HERE, walk a process of self-forgiveness, self-honesty, and self-change and bring all of the pieces of self back TOGETHER.

So let us stop fearing to share ourselves – stop fearing to care about ourselves and each other – stop believing that our pains and fears must be kept hidden instead of realizing the solution of standing up within and as our fears and pains and ending the isolationism that has kept us so separate from ourselves and each other that we have forgotten that the voices in our head are not real and that the pains and struggles that any being faces in this world are equally our own.

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