Living With Everyone’s Wrong Version of You

The version of you that exists in other people’s minds is not you. You know this. They don’t. They’re confident that they know who you are and they’re completely wrong but their confidence makes them stick with their version.

Correcting them doesn’t work. You tell them they’re wrong and they think you’re being modest or difficult or defensive. The correction gets absorbed back into the version so the version stays intact. You can’t fight the version because fighting it just reinforces it.

The version has been built over time from limited information and first impressions and stories people told about you. The version is simpler than you are and more convenient for people to deal with. The real you is complicated and the version is not. People prefer the version.

Your energy for correcting goes away after a while. It’s exhausting to be seen wrong and then have to correct it and have the correction be ignored. Eventually you stop correcting and just let the version exist without you. The version lives its life and you live yours and they don’t intersect.

Sometimes you have to perform as the version even though you know it’s wrong. A family thing happens and you be the version because that’s what’s expected. Work requires you to be the version so you be it. The performance is automatic now after doing it so long.

The version might have things you wish the real you had. Connections based on the version, success built on the version, people who like the version. The real you doesn’t have those things because the real you isn’t visible enough to have them. This creates resentment that sits underneath everything.

You could tell people the truth and try to be seen differently but the work of that is enormous. You would have to be willing to lose the relationships built with the version. You would have to accept that some people just won’t change their minds. You would have to live with the fact that being real means being less connected.

So the version continues and you continue alongside it, invisible and known, alone and surrounded, trapped inside the version that everyone thinks is you and none of them are right about any of it.


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