Read the full transcript of author Ruth Clare’s talk titled “The Pain of Hiding Your True Self” at TEDxYouth@LGS 2019 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Spine: A Brief Introduction
Hello. Before I start telling you the story that I want to tell you today, first I wanted to tell you a little story about the spine. It’s exciting. Turn around.
The spine is made up of a series of bones stacked on top of each other. In between those bones are discs. The role of those discs is to absorb the shocks of everyday life. Those discs are made up of a tough outer ring and a soft inner core.
That’s all I wanted to know about the back for now. But the important thing to remember is that tough outer ring and the soft inner core.
A Journey to New York
The story I want to tell today takes place in 1999. The world is gripped with fear of the millennium bug, and we’re sure that all of our computers are going to crash, which never happens.
At this time, I was 26 years old and pursuing my dream of becoming an actor. I’d landed a couple of speaking roles on television, and I still had hopes that it might come true. When my boyfriend at the time, the boyfriend I’d been with for six years, said that he wanted to pursue his dream of becoming a fashion photographer. To him, that meant going on a road trip across America and living in New York.
Now, it had never been a dream of mine to go and live in New York, but I wanted to be a supportive girlfriend, so I said that I would go. But as soon as I said yes, I had this feeling in my heart. It was a weight that felt a lot like sadness. Now, if I had listened to that feeling, what it was asking was why I was giving up my dreams for somebody else’s.
Ignoring the Inner Voice
But I was very good at not listening to my feelings. In the home I grew up in, I learned that you had to sacrifice who you were to be what other people needed you to be. I learned that feelings of any sort were a sort of weakness, and certainly things like sulking or feeling sorry for yourself were not to be tolerated. So despite my misgivings, I packed up my bag and I went.
But as soon as I landed in America, that weight in my heart grew heavier, and the more kilometers we logged, the heavier that feeling grew. I kept hoping my boyfriend at the time would notice me hiding behind the person saying, “I’m having a great time,” but he didn’t. So I shoved my feelings aside, and we kept making our way, and I decided that New York, New York was where we were going to get to and New York was going to be the thing that made that feeling go away. Because what kind of loser doesn’t like New York?
The Breaking Point
Well, me. It turns out that I really didn’t like New York, and then that feeling in my heart grew to the size of a bowling ball, and it was everything I could do just to keep my body upright fighting against this weight. And as many of us have probably done, I started looking around for little things to give me a shot of joy so I could keep faking my happiness. So I ate a lot of chocolate and I drank a truckload of wine, and as others may have done in the past, I found myself in a shoe shop looking at the perfect pair of boots that was going to make everything all better.
But I’ve been cursed with high arches, and as I went to put on these boots in the shop over these arches, I felt something in my back go twang, and I was flooded with the worst feeling I’d ever had in my life. I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t know that actually what had happened was that that tough outer ring had given way and that soft inner core had forced its way out and started pressing on a nerve, finally demanding to be seen. But I didn’t know that at the time. All I knew was I had to get out of that shoe shop.
The Grand Central Station Incident
So I got the lady to help me take the shoe off because I couldn’t sort of lean forward properly, and I hobbled out of the shop and I found myself on the street. I’m standing there thinking I didn’t know what to do. It didn’t occur to me to call an ambulance; it didn’t even occur to me to hail a cab because I was thinking I’ll save myself some money so I can buy the boot. So I’m going to walk to the subway, which is a couple of blocks away, and I’m going to get a train home.
So I start making my way to the subway, one foot in front of the other, because I’m a tough outer ring kind of person. There’s no soft inner core as far as I’m aware, and I keep walking and eventually I make it into the foyer of Grand Central Station. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the foyer of Grand Central Station, but there’s this huge domed ceiling, and I make my way in there, and by this time, I’m completely grey, and I’ve got that feeling like I may pass out at any minute. I’m in a cold sweat, but as I arrive, this light show starts playing across the roof.
I’ve been to Grand Central Station quite a few times by this point, and I’ve never seen this particular light show, so I was like, “I’m a tourist, I’m in New York, I’m not going to not watch the light show.” So I’m standing there watching the light show going, “Oh, this is really good.
I love this. Oh no, I don’t. Wonder if anyone else has seen this,” and there’s like chiming music, and as I’m standing there, I’m thinking maybe it’s not so bad.
I think I’ve made it up actually. You know, I’m standing there, and it’s… you know, the feeling in my back, maybe it’s not so bad, and the light show ends, and I realize I can’t move at all.
The Rescue
So I’m stuck in this position going, “Okay, right, I go to put my head down, can’t do it, go to step forward, can’t do it.” So I’m standing in the middle of this foyer at Grand Central Station going, “I don’t know what to do, don’t know what to do,” but I still think I’ll just make my way down to the subway.
So I start shimmying across like this, trying to get to the edge of where I can find a railing so I can hold onto the railing so I can support myself to get down the steps. Eventually, someone comes over to me and says, “Are you okay?” and I go, “I’m not okay, I don’t know what I’ve done,” and he says, “Okay,” and then the next thing that happens is I’m standing there, and finally, I’m holding on to a railing at least, and a policeman turns up in front of me and he says, “What seems to be the problem, ma’am?” and I said, “I hurt my back,” and he gets out his walkie-talkie and says, “We’ve got a 26-year-old female with a back problem.” I’m laughing because I’m so American. And then it gets more American than that.
The next thing I know, the fire brigade comes and cordons off an entire section of Grand Central Station, and so there are streams of people walking past me like, “Terrorists, terrorists!” and I’m standing there kind of trying to smile going, “No, normal person with a back problem, a back problem,” and so they cordon off that entire section and then eventually the ambulance arrives and they take me away and they put me on that stretcher and just putting me on that stretcher I pass out from the pain because that has, you know, crushed that vertebrae even more.
The Return and Self-Discovery
But eventually, I get to the hospital, and they give me a lot of drugs, and I realize that I can’t go on pretending anymore. As soon as I get a bit better, my boyfriend is away on a shoot in Miami living his dream, and I decide I’m going to come back to Australia.
So I come back to Australia, and for the first time in my life, I lived by myself. That’s, you know, no boyfriends, no siblings, no flatmates, just me alone in a house with my own thoughts, and what I came to realize was how much energy I put into second-guessing what everyone else wanted or thought or needed from me. I spent so much of my life twisting myself into whatever shape they needed me to be, and I never spent any time wondering who I was or what I wanted.
I realized actually in the home that I grew up in, that was necessary to keep me out of trouble. I had to keep twisting myself into whatever shape my father needed me to be, and I realized that I had put in a lot of energy my whole life into trying to make sure that nobody ever saw the real me because if I wasn’t the real me, it didn’t hurt so much when my father hit me, and if I wasn’t the real me, it didn’t matter so much when my mum was drunk and couldn’t cook dinner or look after me.
The False Self and the Journey to Authenticity
There is a psychoanalyst called D.W. Winnicott who has explored this concept of the false self, and he said, “It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found.” I had spent my entire life hiding, hoping that somebody would come along and see me, but when I lived alone, what I realized was that no one was coming to find me, and I had to be the one to go and find myself.
The problem was I had no idea how, so I went into therapy, and what I discovered was that there are a lot of ways that we hide, and I was particularly good at all of them. You have to have some skills, so one of the ways I hid was by living by myself, not answering any mail, not answering any text messages, not responding to phone calls, not responding to anything from the outside world, so I physically hid myself away. Another way that I hid was by drinking a lot of wine and pretending like I was having a great time all the time. Sometimes I did have a great time, but it was really not real.
But I found the major way that I hid was by not letting anyone know how I really felt or what I really thought, and I came to see that I did that because I was absolutely terrified that if anyone saw the real me, that soft inner core me, that they would despise me, and I didn’t know if I could bear it.
The Experiment in Authenticity
But gradually, with the help of a therapist, I decided I was going to get brave. Not really brave, a little bit brave, because I decided I would do an experiment with somebody who, if they did despise me and they never spoke to me again, which I thought was exactly what was going to happen, then I could live with that.
So this night, I decided it was going to be the night I was going to be my real self in front of somebody. I wasn’t going to make any grand statements; I just wasn’t going to say the thing I thought they wanted to hear from me, and I wasn’t going to squash down my feelings. I was just going to be as much of my authentic self as possible.
And I built up to this moment, and when I said this truth, I was sure there was going to be some massive response, like the minimum I thought would happen would be that they would throw a drink in my face, slap me and walk out and say, “You’re a terrible person.” That was the minimum I expected, and you know what happened when I actually said this truth that I’d never been brave enough to say?
Absolutely nothing, because I don’t think they were even really listening. And so that was actually a complete revelation. I was like, “Oh, no one’s paying attention, no one even notices, oh good.” So I started to take some more risks and be myself in front of more people, and what I found was that not everything I said was popular, but when I’d been trying to second-guess what everyone wanted me to say, not everything I’d said was popular then, and not everyone’s going to like you regardless of what you say.
The Power of Authenticity
And what I found was actually that when people did like me, I felt like they liked the real me instead of the person I was pretending to be. And as I grew more and more confident, I started instead of asking what will other people think of me if I say that, I started asking myself what will I think of myself if I don’t say that.
And as the outer me grew more aligned with the inner me, so too that tough outer ring and that soft inner core grew more aligned, and my back grew stronger.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest achievement.”
Don’t wait for people to come and find you, take your true self out of hiding and see how your world changes.
