I was in class the other day. I’m currently on a study abroad trip in Dublin, Ireland and we did the still face experiment. We paired up with people and did an experiment where it was it from an outside perspective it looks like a staring contest, but we would close our eyes and look away, and then on the count of three, these two people would sit dead across from each other, open their eyes at the same time and stare at each other. And when — the theory is that depending on how — what stage of development you’re in, you will feel some sort of reaction, um, when you look at the other person.
So me being the mentally unstable, insane person that I am, I close my eyes and look away. He goes, “three, two, one, open your eyes,” and I opened my eyes. I look at this girl straight in her eye, and I — and my entire body does a backflip. It just completely freaks out and I’m like, “She hates me. She hates me. She hates me. She hates me. She hates me so much. And I’m going to die right now.” But then I realized because we were talking about projection earlier in class, I realized that I was just over identifying with this feeling and I was projecting my own self-esteem onto this girl who has no opinion of me.
And that’s what I’ve been doing my entire life is just projecting my own self-esteem onto other people and the circular reasoning of constantly being self-reinforced. Um, they hate me because they’re doing this, and you know myself esteem is so low. It just keeps looping and looping and looping, you know — er, it’s my self-esteem is so bad because people hate me, and people hate me because of my low self-esteem, and it just circles around and around and around and around and around and around.
And now that I realize that I’ve been doing this my whole life, I might be able to change it. Twenty years of this kind of sucks, and I feel stupid because I didn’t figure this out until much later in my life, but this could actually be a massive game-changer for me.