Over the last few weeks, I’ve written about my process of unmasking and the need to collapse before you can rebuild anything. I’ve also written about how this has impacted on my views of psychology and led me to more deeply question the models that had served as a foundation to much of my daily life. As happens through any process of allowing yourself to ‘unmask’ - whether that’s after an autism identification, whether that’s after a life change, whether that’s because you’re tired and want to finally be seen as your whole self - there can be a separation of your internal experience and the strategies, defences, behaviours and obstacles that you used to protect yourself from the outside world. So there is, perhaps inevitably, a certain amount of vulnerability to be felt in exposing what’s been hidden behind those masks.
I’ve also been writing on Instagram quite a bit about the recent events in Israel, the subsequent assault on Gaza, and reflecting particularly on how polarised the conversations have become on social media. I’ve noticed how certain people are, in holding their (often un-nuanced) positions, how easily people lose their empathy once we define a group as ‘enemy’, how quite people have been to write others off. It made me think about how desperate we are to find anchors, things we can cling on to - which led me to writing a bit about becoming comfortable sitting in abject confusion as I often seem to be these days.
And that makes me realise that this is all part of the process of the rebuilding, for me.
Because all of those things - masking and collapsing and letting go and noticing how other people hold on to things with such conviction - they are are loosely related, tied together with a theme of allowing myself to rest in uncertainty. Sometimes fear. Certainly navigating through the dark of the unknown.
But as I question, change, let go of many other models, I still have a cornerstone there. The concept I do believe in, whole heartedly. Which is simply common humanity.
That we are more similar than different. And that usually it is those masks, obstacles, defences, walls, armour that hide our similarities which separate us from each other, and sometimes do each other (and ourselves) harm.
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