The Faces We Never Show

March 20th, 2007 by lynnylchan under My Life

There’s a song by 3 Doors Down that goes “You love me but you don’t know who I am”. I found a link to the video, which is actually pretty good. A little bit cliched, but interesting watching.

I think the lyrics for the chorus are so true. How many of us truly know the people we hang out with? There are so many aspects to personality, indeed, one could argue that personality is just a series of masks we wear, such that different people see different masks.

Just when you think you really know someone, they do or say something totally unexpected, such that you never look at them the same way again. Even if it wasn’t a negative thing, for your schema of them to be so drastically revised, that’s a pretty big change.

And maybe because we don’t want people to look at us differently from the way we did before, we hold back from opening up to them. Can you love someone if you don’t know who they are, inside? Why not, indeed. You love the person you see, but whether you could accept the person behind the masks - that’s another matter.

Issues of self and other’s perceptions make my head hurt.