How to live, how to behave, what to think, what to say, how to feel about certain things? How to present yourself to other people?

Creating an image of yourself is a long and demanding work. This image that we present to the outside indeed has little resemblance to us. In fact, in most cases, it is the complete opposite.

All those imprecise parts of the image must act correctly. The curves should be straightened, or at least adjusted to the symmetry with other shapes. And the ugliest picture should manifest beauty. 

It is the same with us people. We grind, straighten, and cut out our feelings, opinions, and actions until they become acceptable. 

Everything we feel inside must pass a normality detector. We carefully observe every word before its articulation.

And articulation itself creates an image of us. It shows how we deal with certain situations, people, and life in general.

I have always found interesting that expression of dealing with something. What does it mean? What is it for? Except for the illusion we create to deceive others, and often even ourselves.

How many times did you bite your tongue, how many times did you have to slow down your breathing to put down a reaction that came naturally but you had to stop it because you thought the image of you was more important than yourself?

No one cares what those locked emotions inside us do. Nor us alone. So I often wonder why is being false more acceptable than being honest? 

And if you think about it, we will often prefer people to be polite (pretentious) to us, rather than rude (sincere).

Why is it so hard to tell the truth? Why is it so wrong to show someone what you think of them? Why is it more acceptable to smile at someone you can not stand every single day?
Why is it so hard to tell and hear the truth? Because every choice you make has its consequences. So we come up with different solutions to make the unacceptable acceptable.
How to make the places we are in less itchy?

Places we are afraid to leave because we do not know what awaits us there somewhere else?

We start cheating on ourselves. We are silent when we want to speak, we laugh when we want to cry, we stay when we want to leave, and expect the same from others to make our coexistence bearable.

To justify our act of staying somewhere where we feel we do not belong.
In a society in which the majority lives according to such principles, people have created various mechanisms and criteria to determine someone else’s value. This same value is higher the more deeply a person is rooted in the mediocre setting of the environment. Mediocrity offers the illusion of security. In relationships, work, and even love.

Because we like to feel secure we do not leave when we want to go, so we choose to close our eyes to everything that is not good.
We do not want to feel rejected, so we hide our opinions.
We do not want to be labile, so we hide our feelings.
We are not ready for the consequences, so we are not telling the truth.
We want to fit in, so we reject our uniqueness.
We believe those who have never even tried, that it is in vain to try to achieve our ambitions and desires.

But we do not know that by putting down our feelings, our truth, our uniqueness, and ambitions, we sow the seeds of anger and cruelty deep inside of ourselves.

We become angry at those who try anyway. Who speaks the truth. Who dares to be their own. Towards the freedom, we had given up without even trying to taste it.

And everyone is left with a choice.
Will you live a life in which you will have to sleep over everything you would like to say to make it sound more acceptable the next day?

Will you end up sleeping over your life because of fear of what others might say or think?

Will you drown in the irony of life in which you tore parts of yourself to be accepted by those who, like you, was so preoccupied with reflecting the image of themselves, that you were completely invisible and irrelevant to them, whatever you did?