Being and Seeming

The great philosopher and teacher Martin Buber recognized two types of human existence: “One proceeds from what one really is, the other from what one wishes to seem.” The duality of being and seeming really is the core problem in relational society today. The wish to be noticed and credited by another human is a powerful lure. It is a seductive force that intoxicates us into a world of make believe absent from who and what we really are. All of us are subject to this seductress. Self-disclosure or self-delineation is too hard; revealing who we really are to another human being is fraught with risk and potential danger. Revealing who we wish we were, what we want to appear as, is a much more protected shelter from judgment and shame.

The tension between being and seeming revolves around the struggle to find the “courage” to be versus the intrinsic flight from ourselves and others in the “cowardice” of seeming. But why? What is so scary about who we really are? I’m reminded of the children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Wilson. One of the opening passages of the book goes like this:

What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

That last line of the passage, “Once you are real, you can’t be ugly” hangs on the wall of the entry way of my office. It hangs there as a reminder that who I really am, can't be scary unless it is unknown. I’ve learned through the course of my relationships, that I have some wonderful qualities, but I’ve also learned through those same relationships that I have some really unpleasant qualities. More than that, I have some really abrasive, harsh, scary, abusive, disturbing qualities. But I am not the sum total of my disturbing qualities and I am not the sum total of my wonderful qualities. I am a totally integrated good, bad and ugly human being who transcends good or bad or ugly. To those that I have allowed to understand all of me, they have pointed out that I am lovable, I am enough and I am real.