The human search for meaning and the associated desire to figure out where we fit into the greater picture of existence can be a pretty confusing mess sometimes.
Sometimes we can end up feeling like we literally spent a lifetime trying to answer the question "who am I?"
Most of the time — at least when we scratch beneath the surface — we started off by looking for relatively simple explanations; perhaps a handy label that would explain what we're experiencing.
So we end up with things like ”being an introvert,” or ”having an anxiety disorder,” or ”having ADHD,” or ”having chronic abandonment issues” or some other convenient thing that seems to — at least for a moment — encapsulate an explanation.
Of course, some people go all in and end up taking whatever label they find that suits them and assume it as their entire identity.
That can become really problematic because one of the things that often happens when you start explaining away your life via a label is that you experience a certain level of what psychologists call ”skills regression.”
The implications of skills regression is basically that a lot of things that you have previously masked yourself with — so that you wouldn't appear weird — now start to shine through. You have this ”freedom” because you have made a shift from simply thinking of yourself as weird (and having to hide that) to actually having a named condition. And then, all those strange quirks that you previously were hiding bubble to the surface and are out in public!
To the casual observer who has known you for a while that seriously looks like you're regressing towards childhood, or at least losing your faculties.
In addition, it becomes all too easy to take what started as an explanation and treat it as an excuse instead.
But this is really a bit of a digression.
Unless you get really stuck in one particular place it doesn't take long to discover that we — as human beings — tend to be made up of a lot of different complex parts, and using just a single explanation to define who you are as a human being is actually doing yourself a huge disservice.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to excuse myself from that crowd. There was a time when I went down one of those rabbit holes myself, and attributed all my difficulties in life to having an avoidant personality. But, of course, that it was just a handy excuse to keep myself from having to dig deeper... and get out and actually interface with the greater world.
I time, we learn about our different aspects, and (hopefully) become truly accountable for our quirks and actions, using any labels merely as reference points, not as definitions.
Thanks for stopping by and have a great remainder of your week!
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2026.09.23 01:28 PDT
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