Why I Hide

Have you ever gone through a phase where you are acceptable to others but not to yourself? I have.
During my early school years, I let other people control my beliefs and values. I conformed. Eventually, I did something unusual. I took the time to look at who I was really becoming. While I was told that I was a good person, I can assure you that I was not.

If you don’t like who you are, what should you do? Shouldn’t it be obvious? You should try to better yourself. Self-improvement become a priority of mine. Conformity took a back seat to becoming a better person.

When I first realized that conforming was making me a worse person, I overlooked something. It should have been obvious. Failure to conform to socially acceptable standards is socially unacceptable. Bettering myself turned me into an outcast.

Who likes to be an outcast? Who likes to be mistreated by their peers? We can even go further. In the modern world, how can you even survive if everybody who knows you hates you? I didn’t want to go back on my improvements, so I did what any sane individual is expected to do. I hid the real me.

I hate living my life in fear that people might discover that I’m not really a bad person. I hate the idea that I have to act as though I am a bad person in order to convince people that I’m not. Whenever I’m hiding, I receive praise from others. I also turn against myself.

When self-hatred becomes too unbearable, I have been known to try to reappear. Each attempt to show myself has always been followed by mistreatment that has sent me right back into hiding. This has created a cycle that I have still been unable to break. Mistreatment leads to hiding, which leads to regrets, which leads to attempts to show the real me, which leads back to mistreatment.

Here in the United States, which is supposedly the model of freedom everywhere, I have learned that I am not free to be myself. With society demanding that the world revolves around money, it’s nearly impossible to survive without employers or anyone else having enough respect to let you do anything that will result in financial compensation. Individuality (in the sense that someone fails to conform to socially acceptable standards) has become a legitimate threat to survival. Until things change, I will be stuck with a frustrating reality. I am a good guy who appears to be a bad guy pretending to be a bad guy who appears to be a good guy.