Have you ever met someone in the train or the subway and told them things that you normally wouldn’t even tell your closest friends? Or maybe anonymously posted a question about something that has been troubling you for a while on Reddit or Quora?
If you think about it, this is quite odd right?
Even my name on Medium — confession time — is actually not my real name. Apparently there are certain things that I really want to share with the world and write about, but i’d rather not have people associating me with it. As to my writing this is quite an interesting paradox. On the one hand I want people to read my stories and discuss about it, but on the other hand I do not want people to know who I am.
Why is it that we put more trust in people who are completely unknown to us and our surroundings, than we put trust in the ones we love. What makes it so hard to be vulnerable? To expose ourselves to those closest to us?
Personally I think it has to do with the urge to be liked by our surroundings. We want people to feel good about us, so we can feel good about ourselves.
Let’s take my writing as an example again. The reason why I do not want to share it with my friends and family is insecurity. I want to share it with the world, but I am not ready to attach my name to it. I am not ready to be vulnerable because I feel it is not yet good enough.
The reason for it being easier to talk about your problems with strangers is because people do not feel good enough about themselves. In front of a complete stranger we can kind of anonymously discuss our problems. We do not have to worry about how it will influence our social credit score so to say. It will not influence how our surroundings look at us.
It allows us to keep wearing the social make up that covers up the things we are not confident or happy about. In my opinion this is a subject that is not discussed often enough. The social make up, the perfect image that we want our surroundings to have of us — look at how people decorate their Instagram profile for example — is what makes it so hard to be vulnerable.
While being vulnerable actually ensures that we keep moving forward and evolve into a better version of ourselves. The perfect social image that we are desperately trying to hold up is what keeps us idle, what prevents us from moving forward.