A few years ago while complaining with gusto to a friend of mine about the disadvantages of aging, one word came to mind: invisibility. I told my friend that being middle-aged, sometimes I felt invisible to the young, to men, to clerks…to the world. She looked at me with an air of absolute understanding and agreed emphatically, both being rather close to having an epiphany on the matter. While musing recently on the idea of relationship, reflection (as in mirroring) and identity, this episode came back to me in a flash. In a society where body image, personal training, diet and fashion are plastered every second pages of every media, I felt that perhaps it was well worth exploring the relationship between being seen and existing, literally.
Most schools of psychology and psychoanalysis from Sigmund Freud to Michael Fordham, Donald Winnicot and Melanie Klein to name but a few, agree that early bonds and relationship with primary carers have a profound influence on how we relate to others throughout our lives. And sure enough the quality of our primary relationships and the ways we are mirrored in our mother’s eyes create the foundations of a healthy or un-healthy self-esteem as well as trust in the world around us (E. Erikson, 1964). Unconditional acceptance and love are the basis of a sound and strong sense of identity, anybody knows that. This statement begs a question however: Have a great number of individuals working themselves out four times a weeks at the gym, running, dieting, obsessing about their body, their health, their image, their age; have they all been badly mirrored or is there more to it than placing the blame squarely on mum and dad? What is driving us to physical and mental exhaustion, not to mention shallowness of feelings? Have we become an immense field of Narcissuses seeking our reflection and self-love in a not so quiet pond or is there a deeper need underlying our behaviour? Regardless of age, could it be that we all feel a wee bit invisible in our inability to connect with others meaningfully and intimately?
The premise here is that we all need to be seen, not seen as “in looked at”, but seen as in understood and accepted, seen as in we matter. That we use strategies that ultimately are not necessarily fulfilling in the long term reflects the ways of a consumerist society biased in ringing and accumulating the dollar. As human beings full of repressed angst and uncertainties we unconsciously wish to reproduce this Elysium state of unconditional acceptance, real or imagined, the coming back to the garden of Eden that lost innocence and original sin have cut us from. We all want to be number one for someone. We even make songs about it. In short we want to feel that we matter to someone, because if we matter we exist. From Descartes stating: “I think therefore I am” to Kenneth Gergen’ s famous response: “ I am linked therefore I am”, lays an inescapable truth: “I think, I connect, I matter therefore I am”. To evade disappearance and get a sense of our own worth we shall go to any lengths, any superhuman efforts, even if it kills us. There are alternatives though. This is where relationships come in.
More than bodywork, cosmetic surgery or any other fads that will claim to make us look younger and more beautiful with the false promise that youth and beauty will bring us happiness, relationships can and will define and refine our identity. The direct benefit derived from knowing who we are is manyfold. For a start the realness of our internal dialogue is reflected into what we project outwards, and this matters, to us and to others. It matters to us because it is authentic, comes from within instead of without and help us grow; and it matters to others, at least the ones we care for, as a chain reaction and for similar reasons. Built historically on many factors, as stated earlier, our identity is based on environment and additionally on genetics, ancestry and individual temperament and predispositions, the x factor so to speak. However, we can only exist in relation to someone or something that make us aware of our existence. In order to know of our existence, let alone our uniqueness, we need to exist in someone’s gaze and to have that someone exists in our’ s. We need, we want to be seen at an intimate level even if it is in conflict with our fear of being exposed. Building and maintaining relationships, romantic or otherwise, challenges us to expose ourselves, to become vulnerable to pain and disappointment AND to the rounded feeling of being part of something bigger, really, uncompromisingly, “warts and all”.
To conclude this self-reflection, relatedness and connections seem to supply us with more sense of worth than all the exercise in the world could do, although we most certainly gain enormously by being in our bodies too through physical activities aplenty. However we are made to matter through relationships and the reflection of our importance in someone’s eyes, be it a child, a friend or a spouse/partner/lover may very well define how and why we exist and who we are. From mother’ s gaze in infancy to another’s in adulthood, nothing much has really changed, we still need to know that we matter in this big wild world, if only once in a while, so we can access a sense of our own existence and have the ability to experience life, moment by moment, in all its complexities and with a lighter heart.
