2025-02-12

I watched Dr. K's video about teaching introverts how to be charismatic and I feel like what he's getting at has been a type of self-awareness that I had been trying to communicate yesterday. He talked about "self-referential processing," which is a brain activity that triggers "being self-conscious of oneself" (I did not use "self-awareness" to avoid confusion about the active awareness of the self in the moment) that strips away one's defenses upon the perception of an other's gaze. That was a fancy and convoluted way of saying we become vulnerable upon recognizing the attention of other people being directed towards us. This happens when someone meets our gaze in a crowd, especially when it's a stranger in a public place. When someone meets our gaze, we become aware that someone "sees" us and this self-consciousness is triggered when we are not ready at presenting or projecting the image of our self that we want the public to see. So we turn away our gaze in a brief moment of exposed involuntary vulnerability. We turn away because we are caught being the person we don't want the world to see.

And it often happens subconsciously. Presenting ourselves to others is very common and part of our everyday activities as a human. But we sometimes forget that these interactions are basically performances of the relationship that we have of the people we are interacting with. We perform to be the person expected of us at work, in our friendships, in our families, and in our most intimate relationships. We divide ourselves and keep our identities within the spaces where those different personalities overlap.

What this made me realize is that writing allows me to be three persons at once. The one who writes is the exposed vulnerability. The one who reads what is being written is the one who turns their gaze into writing. The one who realizes both is the one acting out the performance of being the writer. I write, I read the writing, and I react based on the reading of what was written. The one who writes become everything all at once where these three processes are subsumed into a single entity of me being the author of this writing. I can hide what I want to hide because I am always already carrying out the performance of the writer writing this piece. I am ready to be vulnerable as I am also the one who gazes at what is being written. I have already gazed at what will be written before they become words in this page. I am the creator of the criticism of my own work.