What the lone wolf knows

My PDA nature has always been that of a lone wolf. I have always felt less safe amongst others and a need to proceed with caution or performance. I have always felt safer observing until I can predict what others will do and what my best path forward is. My protective drive and need for autonomy has led me to constantly assess others and their intentions. I often feel on the outside of social situations. I wish I had fur and a tail so I could indicate, as animals do, when it is safe to approach me. I wish most people understood non verbal language as well as I do because I tend to pick up on cues that many people are actively trying to hide or are not aware at all they give off. I know when people are lying or being inauthentic or disingenuous. My “stranger danger” radar is near perfect. I’ve known the feeling of being gas lit since I was a child because I don’t recognize hierarchy and adults lie to children all the time to maintain compliance and hierarchal order; I always picked up on it and knew the trustworthy adults from the non.

From early elementary school until I had kids I was a highly masked person who rarely let others see my truth. I was crafted on the outside and invulnerable. I wanted others to perceive me as not something they could break. That led to people pleasing and a need to meet expectations to keep my true self safely hidden. I relied on beauty as a type of armour. I’ve attached some images of self portraits over the years because they very clearly demonstrate a shift from crafting an inauthentic pleasing exterior to revealing my inner self without concern for beauty. The first 4 were on my dating profile page in 2011 when I met my husband. He said he almost didnt answer my message because it looked like I was trying too hard. When I began unmasking when our kids were 5 and 2, giving up my external need for beauty and perfection was a deep transition that began with my hair and an exploration of how much effort my exterior actually cost me to maintain and how the effort turned to anger so easily. It’s impossible for me to unravel unmasking my neurodivergence from my parenting and the identity shift that followed. It was one ball of yarn. Now that it’s unravelled, I see so many connections between my experience and whats happening in the world today. The world needs a deep unmasking right now.

My ability to know if people are being authentic adds to my constant feeling of vigilance in the world because most people are masking. When I meet a person I know is earnest, I rejoice. On our first date my husband disarmed me with his earnestness. On the rare occasion I am wrong, when someone else’s masking and mirroring ability has slipped past my protective radar, it shakes me to my core for a very long time. People who will say their truth even if it causes you displeasure are rare finds in this world and I treasure them. So many are only showing on the surface what they think you want to see, what will help them. So many are hiding their true thoughts, feelings, intentions, vulnerabilities. This inauthenticity comes with the reality of being publicly perceived at all times and it has been growing stronger since the invention of film and cameras.

Our sense of consciousness shifts when we see ourselves as subjects in film and photographs. I was born in 1980 and am part of the last generation to know what growing up without your own highlight reel is like. With the advent of the internet and social media, we can see at all times, what others want us to think about them. We have the ability to outwardly project, self publish our inner selves as external profiles, for the first time in history. We can potentially reach massive audiences with everything we share. While the pressures teens feel because of this has been researched some recently, I believe this is actively affecting all of us, all of the time. We have created an external version of ourselves and an internal version. This has always been possible but we didn’t have the means to flesh out this external version as fully conceived as we can and are expected to now. And there used to be greater consequences when the versions didn’t match. But with our ever expanding world, it feels like accountability is as hard to come by as authenticity.

For the first time in human history we have the ability to create our own visual narrative that is edited to our liking, regardless of whether it represents a true narrative. We can filter ourselves however we want. So much of our time and energy is dedicated to this now, that we have stopped paying as much attention to our inner lives and whether our actions align with what were once our inner values. We can create our own disinformation that we come to believe. We see the external version of ourselves and what we post as evidence of actions, when really these profiles are only evidence of self projection of an idea we have of ourselves that we are asking others to accept. We have all crafted an identity for mass consumption and if that identity is deemed unappealing to consume, we have the opportunity to change the external version without making ANY updates to the internal person. We have created the ability to be characters or brands or products in our own lives in order to generate profit without accountability. We are all avatars now, faking it for the masses, holding up virtual projections in response to virtual projections. What Big Tech wants is for this to become even more true. They want our virtual versions to soon outweigh our inner versions, for us to get lost in conversations with computer programs that are mining our humanity, enabling a technocratic takeover we are hardly noticing. Apps that measure our social appeal and how much impact or reach we have and then either float or sink our content based on unspoken desired outcomes are the norm already.

Authenticity is what is at stake and human’s feeling of safety and security rely on authenticity and the ability to make sense of and trust our world and perceptions. We need to be able to believe what we see. We are a connected species that relies on co-dependence with each other. This shift toward technology is making it harder for us to trust one another because we are all lying on the surface of these virtual spaces to project an ideal that appeals instead of being authentic. We are constantly marketed things we don’t need but that are slightly “better” versions of other things that already exist. We have now started applying those notions of “improvement” to ourselves, feeling we always need a new thing to reach another level of contentment. We are flawed products in need of improvement and technology is here to save us all and make us more the same. We’re being inched toward homogeneity for compliance sake so we will be easier to predict and manage when those with the technical knowledge take over. Technocrats involved with generative AI and moving humanity toward virtual reality spaces are interested in a projected world for us and a real world strip of resources, running without accountability or consequence. Our resources are being squandered so a few can have the world they want while the rest of us have only virtual happiness left.

I wonder when the masses will wake up and see the patterns I see and start finding their authentic selves again.