Fear of Oneself (post 17)

You cannot create community if you are afraid of yourself.

I know this through experience.

Being afraid of yourself means being afraid of making yourself a target for others' ire or jeer.
This fear is not irrational.

You live in a gigantic pack of murderous animals.
Even if you have no intention of harming or insulting or annoying any of them, you inevitably will.

People will retaliate against you.  People will reject you.  People will mock you.  People may potentially do far worse.

If you are too afraid of this, you risk becoming unwilling to say who you are - what you value, what you believe, what you think your purpose is.  Either that, or you risk prematurely going on the offensive and deriding, mocking or rejecting others before they have the chance to do the same to you.

Either way, you become impaired with respect to establishing deep connections.

Throughout most of history this wasn't a great problem - because most people lived in communities where almost everyone already shared the same world-view.  This is rapidly becoming no longer the case.

In places where people of different cultures interact for purposes of commerce, it has been considered polite to refrain from discussing religion and politics.  That's fine for commerce, but it is a huge impediment to finding or establishing communities.

There is the added problem of proselytizers and missionaries - those who impose their views on others.  Such people impede the formation of new communities as they add an extra element of fear to those who would broadcast their beliefs - the fear of being mistaken for one of them.

In my last post I spoke of the importance of balance.  We can apply that lesson here.

Being unafraid of yourself requires its own kind of balance - a path between extremes of hiding your beliefs, insulting others, or trying to make converts.

Somewhere there must lie a space where one can affirm to the world, "this is who I am", without hostility or ego-centrism, but as a message.

I am alive.  I am looking for those who'd live with me.