They say you and me are ⌈Tautology⌋

I'm trying to condense my thoughts and struggling to. So this is a bit long for a comment; sorry.

I… my personal experience is about having derealized so many of my feelings including of sense of self for more than half of my life and having done so by basically treating myself as… the fakest faker to ever fake, kinda? And coming out of that has made me realize just how much social pressure to delineate "fake" versus "real" identities and feelings exists in society (and how I'd internalized practically all of it). And in coming to embrace the strangest, least normative things about me, I've come to realize that all of that delineation was choking out some part of the real, authentic me.

For me, deconstructing the idea that any of my feelings "are just pretend" or "don't count" was necessary to get in touch with what was hidden behind those walls and establish a baseline of trust and good faith — I needed to say "all of me is real, even the odd stuff, even the frivolous stuff, even the scary stuff" to have, y'know, a lucid connection to and understanding of myself that made sense. And maybe I'm an extreme case, what with the sheer amount of self-mistrust instilled in me. But how frequently do you hear people say things like "oh, I'm not an artist, I just like making scribbles"? I see that as the same kind of thing — people being reluctant to embrace parts of themselves other people will deride as being inauthentically held or incomplete or ill-advised or… etc.

I think one has to be one's self. One's whole-ass self. One just has to, or else one's self-conception and self-understanding is woefully and permanently missing something critical. Or at least, that's what I feel like I had to learn in order to start, uh, living, kinda.