One of the reasons we so diligently hide ourselves from others is that on some deep level, we fear that we’re frauds. No matter what our age, no matter our accomplishments, when we look into the mirror, we still see the child we’ve always been. We see that curious, expectant being looking back at us, just waiting for the real adult to show up and explain to us what this all means.
Of course, that adult never shows up. We wait expectantly throughout our lives to hear the answer, and it never comes. After time, as we age, we suddenly find ourselves in positions of authority. We are parents. We are bosses. We are teachers. In spite of these newfound roles and responsibilities, however, we still feel like children. Even though we become the leaders, we are still secretly waiting to be led.
In spite of the fact that we, ourselves, have no idea what’s going on in the world, we value the power of the roles we’ve been given. We want to be respected. We want to be followed. We genuinely want to lead well. Because of this, we hide our doubts about ourselves. We bury our insecurities deep within. We create outward manifestations of strength, and the less we believe in our understanding, the more elaborate these spectacles of authority become.
The reason few of us feel like adults and the reason why few of us feel like we actually have a clue as to how this world works isn’t because we’re too stupid to understand. We cling to the stories of our ancestors and build the walls of false self-assuredness, not because we’re incapable of understanding the world, but rather because we fear the world our understanding would reveal to us. In other words, we all know what’s going on, but we choose not to accept it because it is hard.
We don’t want to admit that this universe created us by accident. We don’t want to admit that this world doesn’t care whether we humans survive or not. We don’t want to admit that even those we perceive are in power can’t really direct our social institutions. We don’t want to admit that we feel powerless in our own lives. We don’t want to admit that we’ll never know the reason why. And we don’t want to admit that one day this universe will end us, never to consider us again.
We hide like children because we are children. We are children who would rather cling to the apron strings of illusion, as long as they can protect us from what we fear. We tell ourselves comforting stories about our world, so we don’t have to face the meaninglessness of life. We don’t feel like adults because we aren’t adults, and we aren’t adults because we have abdicated the responsibility of living in the truth.
This hiding from our responsibility is one of the ways that our denial of death keeps us from authentically communing with each other. In place of the truth from which we could speak plainly with each other, in place of the truth in which we could be certain of what we said, we project illusions of confidence and self-aggrandizement in an attempt to protect our positions of power from those who might expose us as the impostors we are.
Protected we remain, and yet at what cost? Our illusions protect us from being exposed, but in turn they prevent us from freely exposing ourselves. When we’re forced to act like adults that we are in fact not, we end up playing a game of sock puppets with each other–our projected personhood speaks in place of our true selves with the other’s projection. We’re not interested in these projections though. These fake adults are so utterly boring to each other. They exchange pleasantries about the weather and the kids, but they prevent us from ever truly knowing or being known.
Isn’t it time we stop playing this game with each other? If we each have the courage, individually, to accept ourselves for what we are and to share that broken and fully human self with others, might we find that those others are exactly the same and that we didn’t need to hide at all? We might. And we might actually find ourselves in a better world than the one we work so hard to project to each other, for it is only by genuinely communing with each other that we shall find the meaning that we so desperately seek.