In an effort to cure my crippling shyness and move on from the recent past, I have today been researching narcissism. I found some interesting stuff on shyness as a narcissistic trait. The theory being that shyness is narcissistic because it indicates that you imagine your presence is important.
I have not always been shy. I originally worked with the public. Whilst this was a strain because I am so used to having quite so much alone time, I managed it without too much fuss and was a fairly big personality. Likewise when I became a head chef, I had no problem learning how to work a room full of male chefs to get the best out of my staff. I also have little problem trying new things, so evidently I have a form of confidence. I just don’t particularly like interacting with lots of people.
I am trying to get over this, as I work on the Ina Disguise Entity project, as I think I will call it. I have been back on my old youtube channel and re-released some old stuff. I made a couple of videos today. I still find I am worrying constantly about whether anybody wants to see it, whether it makes sense, whether I should be bothering to try. I should not be worrying about this.
I made quite a few videos for my friend in London years ago when I first went raw, and found the minute the view count hit 40 I just wanted to take them all back down again. The thought of people looking at me horrified me.
For the purposes of inventing Ina Disguise as a person I need to start getting over this as quickly as possible, therefore it is important that I work on it. Making a youtube video should not be a source of quite so much anxiety, especially when you have a very small channel with few viewers. Nevertheless I have already made and taken down about seven, regardless of the fact they only had one or two viewers. This is not perfectionism, as anyone who has listened to the Ina Disguise channel can testify, but social anxiety.
In the spirit of making the best use of this anxiety, I am kind of using it as fuel to make me work harder on my appearance. If I know people will see me, I take a lot more care than if I never see anyone, so it is quite helpful for that. Having said this, in the event I ever do have to make public presentations, freaking out and going over every word I say over and over again is less than helpful. I need to lose the hang-ups, basically. It has become far worse since the family disaster and events of the last decade, so it is something I need to persist in working on.
In the spirit of self-acceptance, it would be nice to forget about it and do back-room types of work, but it does not look as if this is how life is going to work out, so I am going to persist with it. At least it will force me to regard myself as an artwork, which is probably a good thing. It has, however, created something of a crisis of confidence about my artwork. I kind of want to make a bonfire with quite a bit of it at the moment.
Shyness as a form of narcissism is a similar concept to caring as a form of self-abuse. You hand over your life to care for someone else to show what a nice person you are, at your own expense. It is a very damaging way of expressing yourself, especially when you have at least one real narcissist in your family waiting to criticise your efforts at every opportunity. It is up to yourself how strong you are in terms of rationalising and taking action to avoid becoming a victim of these things. I certainly never thought my life would ever end up like this. It was not what I worked towards at all.
So, the Wolfe-era journey has now led me into very unfamiliar and terrifying terrain. A lot of self-evaluation and development is still necessary, despite my exploring having gone relatively well so far. The problem with such self-evaluation is that it opens up many cans of worms you don’t really feel like opening, or necessarily really need to open. I don’t write worrying terribly much about the attitudes of other people, for example, so why would my physical appearance and voice be so different?
All this, I do for a person who will never speak to me again. I am still being an idiot. At least I will be a better educated idiot, I suppose.