 For three decades I've thought that this is something that everybody did all of the time, that it was normal to have your brain running beyond its maximum capacity, taking in every possible piece of information, reading people's body language, predicting what they're thinking, what they're saying before they're saying it, reviewing every possible bit that I know about that human and trying to properly form my words, to edit myself before I've even said anything, to have seven different versions of the same conversation at the same time to make sure I am choosing the best course, the one that makes the most sense, the one that is safest, the one that makes people most comfortable and is exhausting. I've recently realized that maybe everybody doesn't do that. Weird. Hello there, my beautiful internet friends. Welcome back to my channel. Thank you so much for joining me here today. I wanted to expose myself a little bit in this video. I talk about a lot of vulnerable real things on this channel. I've always made a point of that. I've always tried to be authentic and real, which we'll be talking about, but I think that comes a lot easier to me on camera than it does in real life. Because when I am talking to you, you're watching me on your phone, you're watching me on your TV, what you're seeing is me. This is who I actually am, but it is me edited. And when I talk to people in real life, I am editing everything I say in my head before I say it, after I've said it, before I've even thought it, 24 seven. It's something that is such an ingrained, natural part of me that I don't think I've been aware of it up until this year. Growing up as a kid, I had two very loving parents, but there was a lot of conflict in my household. And I learned from a very young age how uncomfortable and emotionally unsafe that was. I observed what was happening and I became incredibly talented at keeping the peace. I took on the role of peacekeeper and trying to diffuse situations before they even started knowing and being so dialed into everyone's breath and tone and movement and being able to predict exactly what was gonna happen around me based on one person's movement or sentence. And then how do I like, how do I get in there to diffuse it before it goes any further? For the record, I wasn't raised in like a horribly abusive household or anything like that. It was just, there were times that were filled with a lot of conflict. And so I developed these skills at mitigating that so well, but unfortunately, I think they just never stopped functioning all the time. And being able to read people, being able to read social situations, have a good idea of what's going on, be able to bring people back to peace, to fuse conflict, those are all good skills to have in your tool bag. But I'm coming to realize that they are not good skills to utilize all of the time. I recently had a conversation with my therapist where she surprised me by saying, you know, you've been coming here for two and a half years now. I know you pretty well, but I actually don't think that I know you pretty well. I wonder how much of yourself you actually show even here. I wonder how much you are editing every word that you say before you say it. And I wonder if there's anywhere that you can truly be yourself with people. I wonder if you even know how to do that. And it really took me back because I was like, no, I'm an authentic genuine real person. People tell me that all the time. But as I'm forming these words, I am running them through like four or five different tones in my head. I'm being very observant of my facial expression, like, should I keep eye contact while I'm saying this? Would that convey better the message or should I not? What am I doing with my body language? How am I using these words to answer this question? And in that moment, I realized I do this all the time. Like all, all the time, all the time when I have another person around me. If my brain was a computer, it would be running hot. It would be running on overdrive. You'd hear all those fans kick in because I am not having a conversation with someone. I'm having six or seven or eight different versions of that conversation. I am so aware of facial expressions and how I look and how I present myself and what I'm saying and what they're saying, how they're receiving it. Halfway through the sentence, I'm monitoring their reactions and their facial expressions to it and what I know about them and if that's gonna click well and should I say this in a different way? And as I'm putting this into words, it sounds exhausting because it is. In the middle of and before I'm forming words and I'm listening to people, it's something that goes on all of the time and I think more than anything, this isn't just something that happens in like new social situations where you might be super aware of like, hey, it's great to meet you. Like I'm supposed to smile, I'm supposed to be pleasant. Okay, cool. It's something that happens with literally everybody, people who are very close to me, people who I've known for decades of my life, people I've known my entire life. I am always running this internal filtering, monitoring computers going at full speed. Just this is the movement that my head feels like when I think about talking. It's trying to filter so much information and simultaneously manage the possible perception of me, of what I'm saying, of how I'm interacting in this conversation. And as I thought about it recently, honestly, one of the biggest consequences of that is that when your brain is trying to run all of these scenarios and adjusting and trying to predict reactions and peace keep before things happen and take all this information consciously in and try to sort through it and manage it and output the proper way and manage my bodily and facial expressions consciously at the same time, there is absolutely no room left for real expression for actually being authentic. And I do try to calm that stuff down to present a version of myself that is actually true, but it is so hard to do that. It is so hard when my brain is so overwhelmed with trying to manage all of these things going on in my brain and trying to edit myself constantly that I have sacrificed knowing who I am and even knowing what I wanna say for the sake of this program that is running in my brain, I am trying so hard, even in relaxed social situations to actively manage a situation or perception or conversation to do the best job I can to make that person as comfortable as possible. And I don't think I need to be putting that much effort into absolutely everything because it doesn't leave any room to just be me. And I think, I hope, I trust that the people who love me and care about me do actually want me to be just me and they've told me as much many times. But it's hard to do when your brain is so focused on everything else that I've completely sacrificed knowing what it's like to just listen to my own voice to listen to what I'm really thinking or really feeling around people because there's so much noise, there's no chance of that genuinely happening. And I think it just comes down to safety and a lot of it has to do with making sure people's perception of me is what I want it to be that I'm a kind person, understanding, compassionate, a good listener, all of which are things that I am, but I'm a lot more than that too, right? Like I'm a full human being but I've suppressed a lot of that sacrificing deeper connections, sacrificing more honest, more real conversations so that I keep things even. I keep it steady, I keep it safe. So I feel like I have some control in a situation where I honestly don't. What I'm realizing now is that I don't necessarily know how to listen to my own voice unless I am alone. But I do think that having your own voice that is real, that is genuine, that is authentic when you're around people who care about you or around people in general is important. So I've begun experimenting with that. As I've talked about what I do that I am on video for a large portion of my job, a lot of people talk about how scary it is to be on camera for them, which I totally respect but for me it's kind of flipped. Being in front of a camera is so much more natural and easy for me than talking to someone in real life because I don't have to worry about all of this constant perception control and the environment of the room and the tone and other people and all of that, it's just me. It's me sitting alone in the camera actually telling a piece of me, actually showing a piece of who I am and knowing that I'm gonna be able to edit that later to be safe, but at the same time it also just comes naturally when I don't have to monitor for all of these other situations. In the past few months as I've become aware that this is something that I do as I have worked through a lot of things through counseling and just self work and reflection. My threshold for being able to do that has started to shrink. My desire to want to do that has begun to dissipate and after so many years of suppressing everything and controlling everything in my brain, I'm just tired of it. I'm just exhausted of doing that. The most powerful things for me has been to find situations where I can completely disconnect. And for me, that does involve right now being alone. And I mean actually alone. I mean away from my phone, not listening to music or an audio book, not being on social media, not having text messages come in, but actually being alone and doing something purely for myself. I found a hobby that fits into this really well and I've been doing it a few times a week where I am completely disconnected from anything that would require perception management. Seeing how it feels to just sit with myself, to not try to think through things, to not try to work on myself, to not take pictures so I can show people later or anything like that, but to just breathe. And that has been really good for me and something that I'm continuing to invest time and energy into and that's begun to spill over into other areas of my life where now that I have a taste of how it feels to just be for a second, now that I have a taste of how it feels to do something for myself where there is no perception management, knowing how I feel in those moments, getting more acquainted with who I am. I started to be aware of what's going on in my brain. It's not gonna stop overnight and to be honest, some of those tools are helpful. Some of them are good things to have in my toolbox but just not to use 24 seven. So when I noticed that I'm running different scenarios of one just simple conversation I'm having with someone, not judging myself or being like, why are you doing that Joe? But just being like, oh, that's what I'm doing here. Okay, I wonder if I can kind of tone that down a little bit. Instead of five scenarios, let's try to go to two or three, right? Just bit by bit, trying to knock that down and also really investing time with people who I don't feel the need to do that with. There are very few select people in my life that I feel that way with or at least feel that way to some extent with and they are the people that I choose to spend the majority of my time with. One of my biggest fears with unlocking this door, actually being aware of the fact that this is something I do all the time. I've been very afraid that because I've spent so much of my time trying to be a likable person and I feel weird saying that out loud, but I know it is something that I have done or my own personal safety. It feels nice to be liked, feel safe to be liked. I think a lot of the things I've done in my life have revolved around wanting to feel safe in a world that, you know, isn't. And as I've had just a few select, few select moments of some of the walls that I've built up, I'm anticipating of being more honest in conversations and maybe being more assertive than I normally would be or more outspoken about something that I care about still in a respectful way, but instead of backing down immediately, maybe I continue to say my thoughts on it. And as I've done that, terrified, certain that they're gonna hate me, right? Or like think like, wow, Joe's really, Joe's really a bitch, you know? And seeing that that doesn't happen, seeing that even if I go too far, even if I get too vehement or if I step over a social boundary or whatever that the people are gonna tell me, they're gonna talk to me about it. I know that I'm around people who care about me enough to be like, hey, that conversation we had the other day, you didn't seem like yourself or you got angry. That was kind of weird. Can we talk about that? Like I know that the people that I'm experimenting with this with are people who will have conversations with me if I do something that hurts them, that offends them. If I cross over a line that I did not intend to step on, I know that they'll tell me. So I've continued experimenting with that and I wanted to put this all in video form because A, I don't think I'm the only one who does this who has this constant inner hard drive, all fans running, working so hard in every situation involves another human being to manage every single possible everything. Like going through the pandemic, having to wear masks, obviously not something that's comfortable but just specifically talking about the mass aspect of things. It was kind of nice that in some situations with people and some interactions, I didn't have to worry about how my face looked as I was saying things. Like it was one variable that I could adjust for and be like, okay, I don't have to worry about what this half of my face is doing. Excellent, cool. Now I just have to worry about every other thing but that one thing is off my plate and it was kind of a relief. And realizing that not having to worry about my facial expressions and thinking about those as I'm doing it was a relief was kind of bizarre. As I have continued to mentally work through just different situations and trauma in my life, I've begun to make peace with the fact that I don't have to be liked by everybody all the time and I don't have to make everybody 100% comfortable 24 seven. It's all right if some things are uncomfortable, I don't have to eradicate the possibility of that at every possible turn, I cannot control other people. And that's never been my goal. I've never gone into any conversation being like I'm gonna control this that like grosses me out to think about. But in my own mind, I am definitely super focused on every piece of control I possibly do actually have to make it the best it possibly can be. I've begun dropping that and it's scary and it's uncomfortable but it's also been a huge breath of fresh air and a relief. And I wanted to share this to ask if you do this too or if this sounds totally foreign. It's bizarre to me to think that there might be people out there. I don't know, you might be listening right now who just talk to people who just like have conversations and that's it, right? Like who just talk to people and it's not like this exhausting kind of process. I'm really interested to read the comments on this video in particular. I don't think I'm alone in this. And if you're listening to this now and you feel the same way, you're not alone in it. And it's something that I'm working to harness the good aspects of, right? Like the peacekeeping skills that I have. Like to keep those things, but to maybe begin to let go of doing that all of the time in every situation to let down some of those controls built up in my brain. And it's a journey that I imagine will continue for a very long time because we don't learn new things overnight generally speaking especially when they are habits that have been ingrained for 30 years. And now my dear and darling internet friend, I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for listening to this. And also one final thank you to my patrons over on Patreon for keeping this a channel live and running for your generosity and your kindness for believing in me and supporting me, thank you. Tej and everyone of you watching this right now, I really appreciate you being here. You could be anywhere else in the world doing anything else but you chose to hang out with me for a few minutes today. And I really appreciate that. I love you guys, I'm thinking about you and I will see you in the next video. Bye guys. Bye. 🎵 Hand her from the sky 🎵