Jonathan C.
Photography by Ben Curry
Breaking from the funhouse.
If you’re reading this, your identity needs no external validation. When you stop living for others and overthinking to please them, you discover the faith and courage to trust your intuition and know what you truly value.
I didn’t realize I’ve been trapped in the cage of my mind until I started to break my way out this summer. This cage wasn’t cast of iron, though; it was far more deceptive. My cage trapped me in a lingering paranoia of funhouse mirrors. I’ve always seen myself through others’ opinions of me –– looking at my own reflection through the eyes of others. This vicarious perception of myself doubly distorted these mirrors that have trapped me in a self-defeating and futile cycle of people pleasing for far too long.
It was easy to feel like pleasing others was a good thing. It was comforting to me to have my opinions and life philosophies constantly validated by others I respected in my life. Actually, not even just by those I respected, by almost anyone. Like others had to approve of my essence — the way I constructed meaning in my life — for me to approve of my own existence.
This led to the first distortion in the funhouse mirror: constantly overthinking everything. Now that I’ve started to take a baseball bat to these funhouse mirrors, I see that so much of my internal monologue revolved around anxieties of approval. I cared far too much about trivial things that I would abstract to be fully representative of myself and how others thought of me, but it turns out that nobody actually cares. This materialized in me overanalyzing everything from physical interactions, to my choices around how I spent my time and with whom, to which goals were worth pursuing, or what career would earn me approval.
Then I realized the next distortion this existential need for approval created: a focus on my outward achievements as a measure of inner worth. In middle- and high school, I perpetually strove for a rock-solid sense of confidence. It wasn’t until the end of high school when I was stacking various leadership, academic, and athletic extracurricular accolades in preparation to kiss the asses of college admissions counselors, that I felt “confident”. It was easy to feel like pleasing others was a good thing, propelling me to my dream school. In reality, this was just an empty shell — a disfigured ideal in the funhouse mirror — of the authentic confidence I was searching for.
But then I stumbled upon an insight from self-help author Mark Manson: “Authentic confidence isn’t something you ‘step up’ to. It’s something you relax into. It’s about being genuinely comfortable in your own skin and with all that you lack.” Up until now, it felt as if I had to “step up” to this aura of confidence, and the most logical way to do so was to wear my achievements on my chest and project them from my mouth. Not a good look, and not a good feeling, either.
This led to the core distortion of the funhouse mirror: in trying to please others, I ended up yapping about my accomplishments, and then I thought people perceived me as a narcissist, so then I thought I was a narcissist and I tried to people please others to make them think that I wasn’t a narcissist. But once I realized that people pleasing was at the root of this core insecurity, a baseball bat appeared in the funhouse of my mind. I started swinging, and slowly I saw through more and more of these distortions people pleasing created, and started smashing the glass, panel by panel.
Over 7th block break last year, my friends showed me that I wasn’t a narcissist, that a narcissist wouldn’t have the awareness to question how their actions affect the well-being of others, because narcissists only care about themselves. I realized I only had to worry about my own business, not that of others. Swing! Annihilating overthinking lifted the smoke off the mirrors, giving me greater calm and clarity in my mind. Crack! I didn’t need the approval of others to exist for myself. Shards of past misperception raining down. In realizing I will never be perfect and will always let somebody down, I’m learning who I am with all that I lack. Staring down at the former image I had of myself in a million pieces, with no power over me. I then realized that the philosophy I held was (at least in part) motivated by pleasing others. It was easy to feel like pleasing others was a good thing.
Another book, Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman, added some spikes to my bat. Burkeman outlines that we have 4000 weeks to live, and that in the grand scheme of things we are specks of dust on a speck of dust, and no one is really gonna care about how many clubs you presided over in high school. He aptly calls this “Cosmic Insignificance Therapy.” In light of this, why would I waste my precious 4000 weeks living the life of others, for others, when no one really cares? If my construction of self was grounded in others’ perception of me, this realization let me take a bat to the most construed funhouse glass panel yet: my ego. How liberating that is!
How scary that is! When I decimated this final panel, the funhouse was gone. But what was behind the mirrors, what was outside this platonic cave? With nothing staring back at me, no opinions of others I had to please, I was left staring into the abyss with no easy answers in sight. This made the summer confusing, and returning to school equally so. I had to confront the motivations underlying my ambitions, my productivity, and how I want to intentionally live my life. My essence was shaken by the realization of my existence. As existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Seatre would say, I’ve discovered the responsibility this puts on me to build my own meaning in my life, void of other authority figures’ expectations. Our “existence precedes essence”, which means that we exist with no inherent purpose as opposed to one imbued into us by God or other societal expectations. We are humans first that just exist, and it is our job to create our own meaning once we’ve smashed to pieces the glass funhouse that entraps us. How do I pick up the pieces to create a self that is uniquely me? One where my relationships, my motivations for productivity and a “successful” career, are oriented to what I believe is truly meaningful to my life? This may seem like a daunting task, as it means that my decisions carry significant weight in crafting a meaningful life.
But the point isn’t to be “right” about your decisions, or for your decisions to perfectly lead you to what you think is “meaningful” and will make you happy. The point lies in making a decision because you made it, because you wanted to, not because of anyone else.
Jonathan C., Colorado College
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