Do i know u???

Ah, now I have learned how deep in the human heart vanity lies, vanity which is the other face of the fear of being unloved

~Chitra Banerjee Divakurani in "The Mistress of Spices"~

have you ever wondered if those you call your closest friends know you? no i dun mean the hi - i'm - so - and - so - and - my - fave - colour - is - black know you but more like knowing your likes, dislikes and would likes. do they know your dreams or your fears? or maybe a simpler question would be this: have you trusted ONE single person enough to let her/him know the PRIVATE you?

i've sat wondering if my friends even know me..i mean for a lot of us we portray/ present ourselves based on society's expectations - be it in accordance to it or a total opposite of it. i know this for a fact coz i do have this huge facade thing going and i know tonnes of people who have bowed to these restrictive expectations (but society will have 2 wait for a later topic k). back to portrayals. we seldom have the courage to speak our minds and often when we do, its just a reflection of a set of ideals ingrained into a society we live in. our whole life seems to be this huge theatre production. we painstakingly build an image and do regular updates and maintenance to keep it minimally flawed (come on, you should have already accepted that no one's perfect by now). we do take this heavy and burdensome costume of ours off once in awhile but we'd rather not as it shows the vulnerability in ourselves.

it is like dis blog i keep. i write these stuff that seems important to me, stuff that i do on occasion bring up in conversations but mostly with close friends and family or well lets jus be truthful these topics usually come up in monologues with myself. my question would be if this is even important to me. how do you, as an external person, know if i truly care? maybe its just written so that ppl would view me as a person with principles and substance when i might just be a selfish airhead.

have you ever done something so truthfully you in front of your friends only to have them ask you : what the hell was that about? or u'r not yourself today mate.

honestly, i know that a huge bunch of my friends, close and not so close alike, do not know who i am. it is sad to actually openly admit that but it is d truth. i can think of 3 close friends, just to put a number to it, who has no clue as to what i'd really like to do with my life. sometimes i feel like saying that they choose to see me as a certain person but most of the time i think what they see is subject to my comfort. i mean a close friend laughed and grimace at the same time (if that was ever possible) when i mentioned that the 1st place i'd want 2 go n see would be india. not going 2 make that same mistake again.

the biggest problem with us human is the fact that we care, sometimes too much, about how people think of us. even the coldest person gets hurt. i guess it relates to what divakaruni has 2 say: the fear of being unloved. at the same time, our 2nd biggest problem is that often we r insensitive to others and we subject a lot of them to a set of ideals to conform to. when we portray this person, lets call it our public personality, we tend to attract like minded people. the more we act like our public personality the more our private self gets shut away, that is if the 2 are different. that private self who has on occasions have a say of how our life is run is now being ignored and we all end up being an unhappy finger pointing bunch. fair conclusion?

if we can't trust a person enough to show him/her who we really are, how sure are we that that person trusts us enough to show us their true colours?

and my question still stands: is there anyone who really knows the 'real' you or is life just a big complex game of charades?