We all conform to different social roles, and each of those social roles require us to adapt our behaviour depending on what is expected of us (by ourselves and others) when in those roles. For example; I would conform to the roles student, friend, daughter, sister, auntie, etc and each role would require me to behave differently, even if the differences are only slight. This type of conformity mostly aligns itself with the idea of identification, in which we change our public behaviour and private beliefs for as long as we are in the social role necessary at that moment.
“All the world's a stage, And all men and women are merely players: They have their exits, and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.”
~Shakespeare
What I am most interested in is how as children we are only familiar with one of the social roles our parents conform to (i.e mother or father), we may be somewhat familiar with their lives before children through stories told to us, and we may catch glimpses of them conforming to different social roles in day to day life, but in reality we will never truly know our parents before children and before the parent social role.
Our parents are strangers to us in a sense. The pre-child part of our parent’s lives will always be just out of our reach and we will never truly know them. We are forever separated by time.
This idea if applicable to all friends and family. You will never know them before they became friend, uncle, auntie, brother, sister, cousin, grandma, grandad etc. In an attempt to illustrate this I chose photographs from my family albums and traced around the images with permanent marker onto acetate, blocking out their skin, leaving an undefined space that people can project others onto. A distance created by time was increased further by masking their features and layering their photos.
Throughout this project I realised that I barely know the people who helped shape me, and that I will never know them. This unsettling realisation still haunts me but this project helped me come to terms with the fact that this will never change.
nice, good idea. But why does this haunt you?
Perhaps haunt has the wrong connotations, but personally the idea that we are all living with strangers and that we will never truly know someone is something that comes back to me again and again. I think about it a lot and, as someone who often overthinks herself and her relationships with people, it often keeps me awake at night. So in that sense, I think the idea is haunting.
perhaps knowing yourself better could help.
do you truly know yourself?
I don't think I do, I surprise myself quite a lot as i'm sure a lot of people do haha
Maybe you're right but i'm struggling to fully understand how knowing myself more would change my knowledge of the lives of those around me. Regardless of how many times i'm told about what my family were like before me it is still coming through a mind filtered by the social role in place, and also filtered by the passing of time. There are so many different complexities to their person, and so many different variables impacting the way they try to show me who they were before me, if they try to show me at all, that I will never get the full picture.
They will forget, they will filter and change, they will remember things differently, and they will no doubt leave parts out entirely.
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