Who Am I and What Am I Doing Here?
By: Noemi Akopian
Tags: Personal Development, Personality, Personal Growth, Psychology

My name is Noemi. I am not a psychologist. I am a writer and theatre practitioner. And though I intend to pursue a formal degree in psychology at some point, for now, I am an avid learner and enthusiast.

A couple of years ago, I fell down the rabbit hole of personality psychology, which lead me through wonderland after wonderland of ideas about myself and other people that I have been exploring ever since.

I have always been interested in people and how we interrelate. But for the most part, I channeled that interest into the realm of fiction. Specifically, theatre.

When you write, direct or act in a play, you spend a lot of time trying to understand a character’s inner world — their needs, desires, and triggers. You break down their motivations throughout the story. You try to make sense of their objectives, super-objectives, and counter-objectives.

Then, you look at how they relate to other characters, how they influence them, how they’re influenced by them, how their words align (or misalign) with their actions. You get to know them really well. And you also see how they get in their own way.

Theatre is a wonderful tool for empathy, but once the curtain comes down, we find ourselves acting out far less interesting and infinitely more frustrating dramas in our own lives. And we don’t hold as much space for the real people we encounter as the ones on the page.

This, of course, is not limited to theatre practitioners. Everybody does this to a certain extent.

We assume other people function like us. That they (should) have the same needs, mindsets and values. If they don’t, we think they’re wrong, backwards, close-minded or bad. Or we think that there is something wrong with us. That we’re disconnected, unseen, unheard, misunderstood, unworthy.

We deal with guilt, shame, anger, and anxiety. We blame other people, social media, the zeitgeist, the system, the language, the government, or the universe for being “meaningless.”

Despite the constant problems with all the things in the outer world, I think one of our biggest problems is that we lack a fundamental awareness of ourselves, our psyche, how our mind is wired. And that is not our fault.

We are complex and dynamic. I almost want to say magical, but we’re not magical. We’re real. We have these mesmerizing brains that are capable of more than we know what to do with.

And from those brains, somehow this unbelievable thing called consciousness — something that even the most brilliant among us can’t fully explain — emerged, and man does it get in our way!

We are either detached from our emotions or completely governed by them. We either lack boundaries or put up way too many. We feel helpless, insecure, and out of control. Or we feel fine, but kind of frustrated. Unfulfilled, unsatisfied, stuck.

We feel like we don’t have time, we’re constantly tired, we’re missing out, and so on and so forth.

I certainly do.

We’re not that different from the characters in a play. Our brain wrote this weird little script it expects us to follow. And for the most part, we do — even if we’re just kind of stumbling through it.

Now, that script is not set in stone. There are lots of effective tools we can use to make sense of it — and even revise it if we want. The brain is a fussy author, though, so it does take work to change its mind.