I was writing last week about my facial paralysis and the state of anxiety I had. During that period, I received a comment that left me speechless. When I was complaining that my face had drooped, one lady told me to look in my ID. I told her that my ID is something that I show to the police officer if I am pulled over, otherwise it does not interest me.
However, I kept thinking about the ease with which we sometimes use our words.
In the name of honesty, we feel entitled to behave without delicacy, to say everything that goes through our heads.
This is no proof of sincerity, of authenticity, but proof of unsophistication, a manifestation of our dissatisfaction, inadequacies and personal insecurities.
I wonder if these people would like to be shown their imperfections. After all, ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. If you only see the negative aspects, what does that say about your filters, right? The good news is that the power to change those filters lies with each of us. But the question is: are we willing to make this effort?
I thought about how we think differently about our age at different times in our life.
When we are young, we tell our age with precision: 10 years and 2 moths old. Those two months matter enormously. We stop playing with the 8-year olds, they are too young, we look down on them. We look up to the 18-year olds, we want to be like them, as if we couldn’t wait to grow up as well.
We are in the same rush at 18 – we dream of graduating university, being independent, being done with explaining ourselves to our parents.
We hurry to grow up, up to a point. Then a time comes when we do not want to look older than we are, we do not want to put on makeup to make us look 10 years older, but we try to hide our wrinkles, not to show how time has passed.
It seems to me that until we are 40, we want to look older – as if that way we seem more important, more listened to. Truth be told, someone told me when I was about 35 years old, that he had nothing to learn from someone as young as me – he was about 50-55.
Actually, it is not our age that make us more credible but what each of us radiates.