Who Am I Doing It For?
Short Answer: Don’t know…But have fun watching me rationalize!
As a former child theatre student, I feel as though I know a little bit about performance. I performed in front of a few hundreds of people, played many different roles, and had fun doing it. At this time, it was clear that my performance was for the watching audience.
But in our everyday lives, who are we performing for? It’s not a question that I really intend to answer, as often times we don’t know, and even if we do, the motivations for our performance are often complex. While I’m asking questions, let me pose a couple more questions that would lead one to the proposition I previously typed: Why do we act the way we act? Why do we feel such desire to change ourselves? Why do we fail to change when we’re set on changing how we do things?
There are psychological answers to some of these questions, I know. Let me give an example after a quick story.
It’s taken me a while in my own life to recognize that I’m constantly performing too. There was a day a little over a year ago where in a conversation with my dad I remarked, “Pretty much everything is sales. Isn’t it?” We pretty much agreed. And I still hold that belief. In a sense, this translates into performance. We are performing, constantly “selling” ourselves to others (metaphorically, not literally). If we’re not performing for others, we’re selling ourselves to our own standards (which are often melded by what we believe will fit society’s standards).
Of course, this relates to the psychological id, ego, and superego. When I refer to the being inside of each of us that is our own performance critic, I’m kind of referring to our superego, which wants us to consistently make good decisions and be an upstanding person. It is also the facet of our personality composed of the internalized ideas that we have developed from socialization and our society writ-large.
So if we can agree that we’re always selling ourselves, whether it is to other people in a desire to be liked, appreciated, supported, and also recognize that we are also performing for our inner standards, then we must ask the question why are we performing? And whom for?
But, of course, rather than answer questions by finding more psychological explanations for the performative critics of our personalities, I find it more fun to ponder them and rationalize within the context of my own life.
I’ve been performing my entire life, and most of it has been off the stage. Whether I was trying to impress everyone around me as a kid or aiming to fit in to clothing trends during middle and high school, or even trying to learn to love myself when I got to college. In every instance, I was trying to meet some expectation, real or fictional, of what I was supposed to be or what would make me feel accepted by others. I have an inherent worry that I won’t be liked or accepted by others, and I think that this worry tends to inform my own inner critic.
‘When I address this “inner critic” or “inner voice”, I do find it important to distinguish this voice from MYSELF. I don’t necessarily know who I am, but if I had to label an “I” in my head, the “I” would be the part of my mind that listens to the arguing voices inside my head and makes a decision. So, don’t be perturbed if I continue to mention this inner critic as some being that is not myself, that’s just the way I see it.
My inner critic’s voice has value because I give that voice value, because I believe that it presents relevant information to me about what will/will not be accepted by others. In a sense, I’m doing as much to be accepted by that voice as I am to be accepted by everyone else. I would also venture to say that it is far more likely that I will be accepted by others than the critic in my head. The critic in my head will always compare myself to others, fail to trust others, and cause me to feel inadequate. It’s holding me to a standard that is very difficult to meet. As has been said, people often judge themselves far more than other people ever judge them. So, this posits the question, if my inner critic will never be satisfied with how I present myself, then am I performing solely to impress my inner critic (and consistently failing) rather than performing to impress others? I’m not sure it’s that simple.
Clearly we do perform to impress others, and value ourselves based on others valuations of ourself. Anybody who has gone through a tough breakup knows this. In my previous relationship, my happiness often relied on how well my relationship was going. If we were having a great week, I was in a great mood. If we weren’t, I wasn’t. I still had an inner critic during that time, but most of his criticism was directed towards my behavior within the relationship, such as moments when I was insecure or acted in a way that was unhelpful to problem-solving. I was trying to impress her more than my inner critic, as his voice seemed to dissipate if all was well in my relationship.
Not everyone has that same experience, but I’m sure people can relate somewhat. People tend to brush over inner criticism when they’re being accepted by others, and a lot of this is because we are performing for others. The praise and acceptance of our performance from them makes us feel valued. We want to fit in.
So, who are we doing it for? The answer remains unclear. There are other avenues that could be mentioned, but I think that I’ve already addressed enough to thoroughly confuse anyone who’s read up until this point. Maybe I’ll dive in further in a piece in the future, we’ll see :).
And the question “Why do we do it? Why do we perform?”, well that was never gonna be a question I could really answer. I’m 19, and have absolutely no clue about what my purpose in life is. “Why do we do it?” seems to be a question that relates to the meaning of life, and why we’re all here, what we’re supposed to do. That’s a question that is really difficult to know the answer to.
One of the phrases I like to hold close when pondering these questions is that it is far more important to ask the questions than to know the answers to them. I hope that I haven’t given you any clear answers to the questions I posited at the beginning of this, because that’s not necessarily the point of what I’m writing. I don’t know the answers, and that’s okay. But, as I've said, it’s fun rationalizing about them.
I hope that these questions make you think a bit, too. And if asking them helps you out, all the better. There are plenty of questions in life that we should ask ourselves, and these are just a few.
Here’s to continuing to ponder life’s biggest questions.
