Looking myself in the I

Self-consciousness, the group, the individual, and the invisible

Have you ever felt self-conscious when there’s nobody else around? I have had distinct experiences of hyper self-awareness when I was alone on purpose – travelling solo, for example, or walking by myself in the mountains. Sometimes, I think it’s just a primal fear response – in the mountains in particular, I am sharply conscious of the steps I’m taking in case I get myself into danger. Other times, it’s a bizarre fixation on how I look while doing things.  

I got to wondering: in our ordinary lives, how often do we go about our daily activities ‘watching’ ourselves? Doing our thing, whether in the presence of others or by ourselves, at the same time as picturing what we look like while doing it? And at some level, are we doing this all the time without realising it?

My husband rightly pointed out that there’s a difference between being conscious of yourself and what you’re doing, and being self-conscious. Self-consciousness, of course, carries some sense of self-evaluation, self-control or -monitoring. Is it possible to replace self-consciousness with self-awareness, or just ordinary presence – possibly even without a self in the mix?

Why being seen is like looking in the mirror

One obvious trigger for self-consciousness is, of course, seeing a reflection of yourself in the mirror (or a screen – how distracting are those Zoom conversations?). A perhaps less-obvious trigger is seeing another face looking back at you; having someone else look directly into your eyes.

In the instance of being seen, you become a self. You know they are looking at your face; and immediately, you are imaging what they see. In other words, you are imaging yourself as the other person, as the rest of the world, sees you.

Here’s a bit of a thought experiment: Can you find that face – your face? I recently came across the work of Richard Lang, known as The Headless Way, which centers on the intriguing and rather weird-sounding observation that none of us can see our own heads. This may seem like a statement of banal physicality (obvious, even – after all, you might think, our eyes face forward – of course we can’t see our own heads!). But consider the implication: we go through life experiencing ourselves only from an outsider’s point of view, which we then internalise.

Another experiment: Hold up a mirror. Where is your face? Is it there inside the mirror? Of course we know this is not the case. But just for a moment, play with the idea. Imagine reaching inside the mirror, taking hold of the face you see there, flipping it around, enlarging it, and putting it on. That is essentially what you are doing when you are interacting with other people – you are putting on the face you see in the mirror. You are imaging yourself as other people see you – and assuming that what they see is what you’ve seen in the mirror (and, probably, all the judgments and labels that have been attached to it).

So until a person looks back at you, are you able to watch them and experience the world without a picture of yourself in your mind? Is your perception ever free of a face and a body?

Do we, at least as we imagine ourselves to appear, only exist through other people’s eyes?

Avoiding eye contact and becoming an individual

A confession: through my life I have struggled with the tension between wanting to be seen and wanting the exact opposite.  

To be seen means to be acknowledged and understood. More significantly, it means to be accepted. Acceptance means you are being taken in by the group, or at least by one other human being – or just given some sort of OK. Perhaps to be seen, to hear “I see you”, is not so much to be told “You are one of us” as it is rather “You make sense to me”. But in either case, in order for this to happen, you first need to become an individual in the other’s eyes. And practically (ignoring the digital world for now) this requires direct eye contact.

What is really going on when we can’t look someone in the eyes?

I do it; we all do it sometimes. We avoid eye contact with another human being, for all sorts of reasons.

Oftentimes it’s cultural. There may be some power distance. We wish to show respect to another, or deference to authority.  Sometimes there’s shame, something hidden, a lie even; there’s something between us and them. It may be about avoiding conflict. Or sometimes it’s a sign of anxiety, awkwardness, distractedness, boredom… or the need for thinking space. We may avoid eye contact, without thinking about it, because we’re trying to think. We may avoid eye contact to try to tell the other person as much (and, in my case, in the hope that they’ll shut up and let me do so). It can be a concession, a retreat, a withdrawal, a step-down. It can also be a put-down.

But I think avoiding eye contact is as much about avoiding human connection as it is about avoiding being seen – and, in effect, avoiding confronting yourself.

When someone looks you in the eyes, you become a person to that other person. At the same time, you become more aware of how you see yourself, of your projected mirror-face. In other words, you become self-conscious. And maybe you also become aware of how vulnerable you are to others’ assessment.

Maybe it’s a fear of being assessed, or more specifically a fear that you can’t see or control what others are thinking of you. A fear that all the pixels of your complex Self have now been resolved into a single whole, and the rest is up to them. A fear that you have now been reduced, by becoming fully revealed.

You have now become a complete other. You have been made aware of your otherness – your singular otherness. Your object-ness. Worse, you have been shown up for seeing their otherness. And now there is nowhere to hide.

Whereas if you don’t catch their eye directly, you could be just a disembodied voice; you could be a conversation; you could be the topic under discussion, you could be the issues at hand; you could be the content of your thoughts, which are hopefully of service to others and are arbitrarily extensible and, most importantly, impersonal. Hypothetical, even. They might even be a bit ugly. But at least their owner is invisible. 

Self-awareness is a burden but get over yourself

So, is being afraid of being looked at the same as being afraid of looking at oneself? Or simply the fear of being judged?

To the latter one could just say: so what if others see me a certain way? It’s just their projections. The way people see me is all about them, not me. Maybe the corollary is that being looked at amplifies my own self-projections.

Is being seen challenging because it forces me to confront my limits? Does it force me to confront the fear that what I am, not just what I think others see, is not enough? For me it often feels like a fear that they will see through me, see my secrets, see my thoughts which are sometimes undesirable. Or at worst, see my shame and say: “So what are you going to do about it?”

And what do we do with that discomfort? Well, in a way, we have to kind of … get over ourselves.

The luxury of blending in

Being seen is a universal human need. Where it gets challenging seems to be about the interplay and trade-offs between being an individual and being part of a group. So I recently began asking myself the question:

Beyond my real need to belong, is it actually the case that I want to be seen only when it suits me?

You want to be seen? Rubbish, Fran – what you really want is to be able to appear and disappear at will. The truth is probably that I like to be seen as an individual sometimes and as a member of a group at other times. And that I fall back on the latter often enough that I don’t even realise I’m doing it.

And that is what privilege is.

Shape shifting  

The next tough questions to ask are: What are the instances where I fall back on, hide behind, and take advantage of group membership, versus the instances where I want to be – and have the luxury of being – seen as a unique individual?

I know that one of my values is self-expression. That’s not original; it’s inherited – western liberal culture is built on the values of individualism and self-determination. I’ve also become aware of the privilege of expressing myself as an individual without having to worry about being attached to my group or background.

Everything’s relatively simple until you become the sole representative of your entire group. How often are you the only person like you in the room? In my case, I will admit that it’s actually very seldom.

When you are the only one from your group, you become the group. When you are in your group, you can be unique – or you can blend in. 

There are things I’ve felt, or thought, or done, that are actually (probably) signs of the privilege of my group membership or of being able to shape shift between them and my individuality. For example:

• Gave critical feedback and opinions to men only, in a team where I was not the only woman, partly because in this instance I knew that my being from an out-group on the one hand (female talking to male) actually probably worked in my favour (because of the assumed norms around men being less likely to challenge women); as much as my being an in-group member on the other hand (white woman talking to white men) also did – and more prominently. Taking advantage of being a white woman, in other words, not to hurt but to avoid certain discomfort. There were other reasons relating to individual relationships, but these in turn are a whole other can of ‘whys’.
• Got bored with the fact that I worked with women only, or women mainly. This might seem like a stretch, but I was lucky to be able to feel bored rather than awkward at best, or threatened at worst, if I were the only woman.
• Probably several times did not speak up about something, for various circumstantial reasons, but I believe part of it was that there were others like me who would pick it up.  

Self-consciousness has felt like a burden my whole life, hence my fascination with understanding and dismantling the concept of Self.  But now I realise the ability to even conceive of dissociating from, or even temporarily forgetting, one’s identity, might also be a privilege.

The ability to feel invisible might even be a privilege, so long as you haven’t been made to feel that way. Maybe this is linked to that feeling that one’s culture is invisible or non-existent because it’s the assumed default.

I think it’s even a privilege to be self-deprecating. You’d never put yourself down in front of others unless it was a strategy (to make light of things, to appear agreeable or harmless), or unless there was no cost to doing so. Irony and self-mockery are possible because there’s something to come down from. I’m not saying I haven’t put myself down out of low self-esteem. And no, I don’t believe one should add even more shame to the shame of using martyrdom as the only strategy one thinks will work.

All of this points back to and redoubles the necessity for self-compassion: the realisation that we are all half-blind (not colour-blind) and vulnerable and afraid of being lonely.

More importantly, that we mean nothing without others.

Intent and impact

“I didn’t mean that”. “You misunderstood me.”

“Nobody understands me.” “It doesn’t matter anyway.”

We can’t go through life saying that’s not what we meant and making it their fault. We can’t go through life misunderstanding each other; missing each other. We are nothing without the other person. We can’t mean anything by ourselves, right?

I’m not saying intent isn’t important and impact is the only thing that matters. I’m saying understanding and humility are what bridge the two.

Or maybe we have to accept that there is no such thing as perfect, symmetrical insight between people. From this perspective, the truth is outside of us (rather than “out there”, to throw back to The X-Files). It’s ‘co-emergent’. Meaning is something in between what I put out there and what others see.

Ultimately, we are not our thoughts. I’ve suggested previously that to stay sane we should disidentify with, even disown, our thoughts and what we put out there as a result. Now this sounds half-crazy. I think we have to disown and own everything, even if we think it’s not ours.  

“Nobody understands me” is the truth (and I’ve got the luxury of saying that I’m not sure I’d want the opposite anyway). “Let’s understand us” is the strategy.   

We need to step out of the spotlight. Even if, like me, we think we’ve been trying to avoid it our whole lives. Or we need to grab hold of it and use it for others.

One thing to try: Being the space for others

In closing, I’ll come back to something I’ve taken out of “The Headless Way”.

I’ve suggested that self-awareness is a burden; it is, of course, the price of admission for conscious living. Or so we think. But also, it’s possible just to be space for others, without, in effect, being a self. This is not to attempt to solve society’s problems or even the complex questions of identity, but something you can do when you really want to connect with others. That is, when you want to give them your (self-less) presence.  

Here it is: Try not seeing yourself when others look at you. When you’re in a room talking to a loved one or a group of friends, or even when there are lots of people looking at you, and when they look you in the eye, instead of imagining the face they see, just imagine space. Space for them. In essence, just disappear for a while.

I’m not saying switch off your camera on your next video call; I’m saying don’t have your face visible to you.

You may even imagine zooming out to include a view of everyone having the conversation. In other words, become the space surrounding two (or however many) voices – theirs and yours. Step away from the separation between yourself and them.

This is an experiment. As Richard Lang said:

“Just be clueless. Pay attention and see what happens.”

(Taken from the Making Sense podcast episode “The Illusory Self” with Sam Harris in conversation with Richard Lang)

Post-script

Fun fact: The featured image is of a Pulcinella mask. Pulcinella is a classical Neapolitan character which evolved into popular adaptations like Mr Punch. Pulcinella is both an everyman, representing the voice of the people, and a cunning shapeshifter; a versatile, dualistic character, making fun of the mighty yet able to take advantage of the system, and always in contradiction with himself. A “Pulcinella secret” is a secret that everyone knows.  According to Wikipedia, Italian psychoanalyst Emilio Mordini argued that Pulcinella secrets “are not really secret in the sense that they are unknown or unknowable, but because they are labeled as secret”.

Fun fact 2: Do you know how hard it is right now to find a picture of a mask that covers the top half of a person’s face and not the bottom?