Subway reflections

On our inner critic, misleading perspectives, and the puzzle of our identity

It is so fascinating how we tend to exacerbate the significance of our distinct behaviours and so-called flaws, dissimilar traits of our personality from the others’ or certain little mistakes, only because we judge ourselves tremendously, we are very harsh with ourselves, and in some cases, aim to a level of perfection which doesn’t exist in reality.

Today I witnessed a lady in the subway worrying too much about her appearance, because she was telling me, as I was seated in front of her, that she got dirty on the pants because she came with the maxi taxi from the countryside. Perhaps she thought that I was staring at her legs wearing the pants which were only a bit dirty, just in a place, but in fact I didn’t even notice the tiny stains and it didn’t even occur to my mind to draw some conclusions about her in any way.

Therefore, I reflected a bit about this brief encounter and realized that I had experienced the same thought-process in the past, when I had the impression that somebody was judging me or looking directly at some flaws - very obvious from my point of view - but in fact they didn’t even take those into consideration.

In reality, people don’t critique us as severe as we expect in our perception, they might not even observe some aspects about ourselves that we stress about so deeply. What deceives us into believing they would behave this way is a very specific mechanism. We have the tendency to focus only on the negative parts about ourselves, on the insignificant errors that we make, on how we might embarrass ourselves if we don’t perform ideally, sometimes not even taking into account our qualities or competence. We often overlook our brightness, beauty, intelligence, kindness to the detriment of our confidence and self-respect, allowing the anxiety and distress to take over our judgment. As a consequence, we become too self-aware, let the inner criticism evolve into a sabotaging weapon.

The situation resembles being frustrated because a few pieces from the puzzle of our identity are shuffled, instead of being proud that we accomplished putting in place the majority of them. In other words, stepping aside and trying to visualise the bigger picture would be a part of the solution, to realise how minor the effects of those mistakes or flaws actually are when we see the scene in perspective.

Pinterest