Some fear that if they show who they really are, no one will love them. The truth is that until you start acting like you really are, no one can love you.
If you are a deep person, you realized at a young age that openly demonstrating the depth of your heart and mind to others causes confusion and resentment in them and sorrow in yourself. The sorrow comes as a mix of the negative reactions from others and the painful realization of the fact that you are surrounded by people who are not like you, who cannot see you, and who cannot fulfill your deep yearning for true interaction with another soul.
No amount of people will alleviate your loneliness until or unless you know yourself and show yourself to others. Without giving direct access to your inner self, how can you ever attain the deep meaning only possible through deep connection with other people? The barrier of distance is two-way: You can’t experience someone beyond the access you give them to yourself.
No one can ever like you if you are never yourself. A mask protects you by hiding who you really are, but it also makes it impossible for anyone to really know you. When someone likes you for who you pretend to be, they don’t like you —they like the mask you are wearing. Pretending to be someone else requires you to maintain a certain distance from others who might otherwise more easily discover your rouse. Why pantomime as another person just to please others? Is there anything more lonely than playing a role for the rest of your life because the people around you love someone who isn’t really you?
You can’t be loved by someone beyond how much they know what you think, feel, and do. You can’t love another beyond how much you know what they think, feel, and do. Love is an action—the choice to sacrifice for the benefit of another—and you can’t know what would benefit a person without knowing them. To the extent you do not disclose yourself, you will withhold from others the love you could otherwise give them and withhold from yourself the love they could give you.
You can’t experience the joy of someone enjoying you for who you really are without first being who you really are. You have to open yourself to greater sorrow from others if you want to open yourself to greater joy with others. The inner self is inherently vulnerable. Direct access to it can cause greater suffering than anything else. While it is impossible to be who you really are without exposing yourself to criticism and disappointment, it is also impossible to find emotional connection, trust, and intimacy without exposing yourself. Criticism and disappointment are the price you must pay for meaningful relationships. The good news is that invalid criticism need not affect you, valid criticism will only make you better, and every disappointment orients you more fully toward what is worthy of your expectation.