My life as I knew it, came to an abrupt end on September 23rd 2018. The final straw that broke the camel’s proverbial back piled on that autumn’s day. My first girlfriend (ever) broke up with after 6.5 years together. We were actually engaged for those last 6 months too.
Starting the very next day I (unknowingly at first) began to become aware of the masks I wore and slowly began to take them off.
At the time, I was 29 years old making good money traveling the world as a DJ, flying first class, staying in luxury hotels and eating at fancy restaurants. When I first started this musical journey 14 years prior…it was because I was in love with the music. I was hooked on the feeling of euphoria every time I got behind the decks knowing I was going to control the vibe of an entire crowd. Over the last decade and a half however, my “why” for playing music went from loving energy/vibe/atmosphere and the manipulation of music to satisfy crowds and became about optics on social media. I stopped “digging the crates” for new music and found myself digging holes of anxiety into my mind.
As I sat on a flight from NYC to London, 1 week after my break-up I began to think about what it meant to be happy. It was perhaps the first time I had ever asked myself that question AND had been genuinely curious about the answer. As I contemplated my utter lack of joy, I thought about how most people who were witness to my life via Instagram & Facebook to name a few, would think of me or say to me at that moment. “You’re so lucky”, “You have a blessed life traveling the world doing what you love”, “You are a successful artist/entrepreneur”, “You play music for large crowds of people all around the world and you eat at amazing restaurants”. All things I had actually heard before. And you know what? If one of those people was sitting beside me on that flight and had given me that pep talk they would have hit all the right emotional and logical notes. But to me, I knew something wasn’t right.
I was at a point in my life where I was traveling often, spending money like it actually did grow on trees and I spent more time coming up with captions for my highly edited Instagram photos (thanks for the assists, Drake) than I did actually being happy. I was good at portraying happy. I was really good at making things look good versus concerning myself with things actually being good.
This realization was quite an unnerving moment because I began to see that all of my happiness was created from outside of me, and that the joy I experienced when I was touring the world or eating fancy meals had nothing to do with real joy. It appeared to me that I needed things outside of me in order to feel good. The image I was projecting to the world was dependent on external factors. And when I was not out playing shows or taking pictures to hopefully make others think I was happy/successful, and I was home…I felt EMPTY.
The unfortunate truth is that if you had asked me how my life was going or how I was feeling at one of those moments captured for the ‘gram I would have probably responded: Yes, things are great. I’m a lucky guy.
But, if you had caught me in a quiet moment, when all those stimuli weren’t bombarding me, I would have responded in a completely different manner: I am exhausted. I hate how I feel, I hate how I look. I spend more money than I make. I don’t love what I do. I feel empty knowing I am not contributing to the world, my relationships or to my health.
On the day I recognized the core reason for my unhappiness, I also realized that I needed the external world to remember who I was. My identity became likes on social media, the airports I geotagged, the expensive restaurants I ate at and the things I bought. When I wasn’t around the things or people who would help me recall this personality that the world might know as me, I wasn’t sure who I was. I began to understand that I was addicted to my environment, and that I was dependent on external cues to reinforce my emotional addictions. What a moment! I had heard a million times that happiness comes from within, but it never hit me like this before.
When we memorize addictive emotional states such as guilt, shame, anger, judgement, anxiety we develop a gap between the way we appear and the way we really are. The former is how we want people to see us, the latter is our state of being when we are not interacting with all of the different experiences, diverse things, and assorted people at various times and places in our lives. If we sit long enough without doing anything, we begin to feel something. That something is who we really are.
Layer by layer, we wear various emotions which form our identities. In order to remember who we think we are, we have to re-create the same experiences to reaffirm our personality and the corresponding emotions. As an identity, we become attached to our external world by identifying with everyone and everything in order to remind us of how we want to project ourselves to the world. How we appear becomes the facade of the personality, which relies on the external world to remember who it is as a “somebody”. It’s identity is completely attached to the environment. The personality does everything it can to hide how it really feels or to make that feeling of emptiness go away: I earned these flights, I am worthy of those meals, I’ve had these experiences, I am successful…it is who we think we are in relation to everything around us.
But that is different from who we are — how we feel — without the stimulation from our outer reality: feelings of shame and anger about addictions to porn and substances. Fears of bankruptcy and unmanageable credit card debts. A sense of inadequacy due to a parent’s insistence on perfectionism and achievement at all costs. A preoccupation with thoughts of not having the right body type in order to look and be accepted a certain way by the world. These kinds of feelings are the what we want to conceal.
This is who we truly are, the real self hiding behind the image we are projecting.
We can’t face exposing that self to the world, so we pretend to be someone else.
We create a set of memorized automatic programs that work to cover the vulnerable parts of us. Essentially, we lie about who we are because we know that societal mores do not have room for that person. That is the “nobody”. That is the person whom we doubt others will like and accept.
Particularly when we are younger and are forming our identity, we are more likely to engage in this kind of masquerade.
We see young people trying on identities like they try on clothes. And in truth, what teens wear is often a reflection of who they want to be, more than it reflects who they really are.
Ask any mental health professional who specializes in working with young people, and they will tell you that one word defines what it is like to be an adolescent: insecurity. As a result, teens and preteens seek comfort in conformity and in numbers. Rather than let the world know what you are really like, adopt and adapt (because everyone knows what happens to those who are perceived to be different!). The world is complex and scary, but make it less frightening and much simpler by lumping everyone into groups. Pick your group. Pick your poison.
Eventually, that identity fits. You grow into it. Or at least, that’s what you tell yourself. Along with the insecurity comes a great deal of self-consciousness. Questions like: Is this who I really am? Is this who I really want to be? But it’s so much easier to ignore those questions than to answer them!
Well, no doubt my problem was that I picked a lot of poisons. I chose to say yes to every group, to every invitation and to every “opportunity”. I felt I was never going to fit in anywhere and I tried to fit in everywhere. It got expensive and the masks began to wear heavy. Eventually, the curtain closes and you’re backstage alone.
Most of this article was interpreted and paraphrased from Dr. Joe Dispenza’s book Breaking The Habit Of Being Yourself. In the chapter entitled “The Gap” he talks about how to discover who you really are and how to begin living transparently with that true self, unencumbered by external factors. It was perhaps the most important chapter of any book I’ve ever read with regard to my self development and my journey towards living a peaceful and authentic life for ME. I highly recommend it to anyone (at any age) going through an identity crisis or feeling uneasy about how they feel when they’re alone and with their own thoughts.
What really matters in the end
If you need the environment in order to remember who you are as a somebody, what happens when you die and the environment rolls up and disappears? Do you know what goes with it? The somebody, the identity, the image, and the personality that has identified with all of the known and predictable elements in life, who was addicted to the environment. You could have been the most successful, popular or beautiful person, and you could have had all the wealth you ever needed…but when your life ends and your external reality is taken away, everything outside of you can no longer define you. It all goes.
What you’re left with is who you really are not how you appear. When your life is over and you cannot rely on your external world to define you, you will be left with that feeling you never addressed. You would not have evolved as a soul in that lifetime.
For instance, if you had certain experiences 50 years prior that marked you as insecure or weak and you felt that way about yourself ever since, then you stopped growing emotionally 50 years ago. If the soul’s purpose is to learn from experience and gain wisdom, but you stayed stuck in that particular emotion, you never turned your experience into a lesson; you didn’t transcend that emotion and exchange it for any understanding. After all, wisdom doesn’t come from experience by itself. Wisdom comes from experience that we’ve reflected on and extracted lessons from. If experience were to equal wisdom then the older we got the more wisdom we would accrue…which as we know simply is not the case. While that feeling still anchors your mind and body to those past events, you are never free to move into the future. And if a similar experience shows up in your present life, that event will trigger the same emotion and you will act as that person you were 50 years ago.
Nothing changes if nothing changes.