My mother is a wonderful woman. Strong, bold and courageous.
Yet there is a fine line between being strong, bold, and courageous, and being weak, frail, and timid.
I have always believed that many extreme characteristic traits, anything that seems to deviate from the ‘normal’ scale of any characteristic traits, are often almost an overcompensation for the opposing trait. For example, I often believed that my mother tends to overcompensate for being weak, frail and timid, by being so strong, bold and courageous.
This simple theory of mine was derived from observing human behavior when it comes to human communication. For example:
- People who feel inferior will often tend to speak louder, because they felt like they aren’t being heard.
- People who experience depression will often tend to be funny and loves making people laugh, just because they assumed that they could hide their depression by making themselves appear funny.
- People with low self-esteem will often tend to brag because they felt the need to ‘show’ and ‘be heard’ in order to be recognized.
This is overcompensation.
And when you start to make the connection between these traits and the people you actually know, you start to realize how so many traits that are deemed ‘silly’ are really cultivated by what we know as ‘society’ – simply by humans passing unnecessary judgment across another human being, we have created this need to ‘overcompensate’.
We can argue that there is no need to be upset by these judgments, but each one of us have our very own image that we like to project to the world. And this image of us that we like to project to the world, is unfortunately, heavily reliant on the judgement of society.
And this is really upsetting.
My mother is so afraid of being alone, and this fear of hers has led her to be a hardworking women who strives for independence even into her retirement age. She has overcompensated by becoming successful in so many ways, but it has also made her very sad.
Maybe it is because she is a modern women, too ahead for her time. Or maybe it is because she has become too independent, that the men of her generation could not seem to accept. OR, it could also be due to the way her brain makes the connection between being alone and the need to be independent, which has created a need for her self-defense mechanism to take charge.
But we all know, time and time again, that self-defense mechanism is a double-edge sword. It can make you feel safe, but it will also drive you away from people. All this happens due to the unrealistic fear that offsets the balance within an individual.
The overcompensation that becomes so overwhelming, that you unconsciously submit your very own life and consciousness to destruction.
And sadly, this is all part and parcel of being a human being in this modern society. Everything is intertwined, despite how else we would like to think about it.
So tell me again, what exactly is this thing we call life?
The Diary of Bel 