I have always had fantasies of belonging. I've always thought it must be wonderful to feel true brotherhood, true kinship with someone or a group of someones. As the perpetual outsider only child-type that I am, that sort of thing has been hard to come by. I've never really been part of a team in that way. My life has been spent looking inside from the outside, existing on the fringes. Through almost constant contact with sociopaths in my youth, I learned to mimic the traits and emotions of those around me to get the things I wanted, to be seen as a familiar. I became so good at this that I forgot I was doing it for many years. My father and close friends were experts at this craft and it just became my way of being in the world.
In my current incarnation, I do my personal best to be authentically myself in all that I do. I did all that stuff in a misguided effort to attain things, status, and experiences. Once I lost all my things and status, I realized, while unpacking my mind, that I had nothing to protect by being false anymore. I lost my money, my job, my self worth, many possessions, and my health. Facing all of that, it got to be too much work to keep up the old acts, to keep running the old scripts. It was during this time that I realized the staggering depth of my inauthentic behavior. It had crept into every facet of my life due to an overwhelming belief that I, at my core, was worthless. I thought I had to act like what people wanted or needed me to be for them to be successful or happy in a given situation to be allowed to hang around and not be alone and that any acting I did would be much better than letting those people see my real self and personality. That would certainly get me ejected, I thought, so I learned to mirror those around me for acceptance.
I needed to get authentic because I totally forgot who I was. I found myself lost, drifting in a sea of all the people I have been. I forgot the basic things, like what makes me happy and what kind of music I like to make. I did anything I could get into that paid something and walked the company line while doing it. I didn't want to be seen as bad for morale. In the end, I think I went crazy there for a while, got all fucked up and suicidal because I just didn't see the point in anything anymore. Everything I did was false. I was motivated only by money, another of Dad's hand me downs, and that was it. I stopped writing songs and poetry, gave up on myself and my dreams and spent the best years of my life playing music that meant little to me. Dad always said that as long as you were paying your bills, everything was ok and I settled for that worldview for a long time.
Now, I do my daily best at being myself, with zero fucks given. I still struggle with negative feelings, anxiety, and inferiority, but am much closer to being fully myself than ever before. I'm still dealing with a lot, but finally being free from those old ways makes anything I am able to do now a lot more meaningful because, finally, the right intention is driving me forward.
All of this has had a cost, in terms of friends, relationships, and my dealings with the world. I found out that I can't be around anyone I have to mirror in order to maintain a connection with. I have no patience for that anymore. Way too much work. This has trimmed my social circle down to pretty much nothing, but those that remain are all keepers. It has, however, reignited my creative side to a level never before seen and I find myself doing more and better work than ever before. This work is now bringing new people into my life and, while I know to be cautious, some incredible people are starting to emerge. It's taken my whole life to figure this out, to get my heart and head in the same sandbox, and rid myself of the mental dissonance I carried most of my life. It's not all perfect and I'm still a difficult and often infuriating person, but that's just my nature. What's new is that I'm the same person every day now and that person is tougher, more resilient, and more into being an artist than ever before. I still piss people off but their reactions are less important than they used to be.
To me, this is what happens when you've been outsided for too long. I realized that nothing I did to attain that feeling of connection had worked. It was one long bang-the-head-on-the-wall sort of experience. At some point, you break down, give up, and realize that yourself is all you can be and you need to be that in all things if you want to have any hope of healing yourself. When that happened to me, it felt like the end of everything, but it has really been the beginning, a whole new level of the game.