FRAGMENTATION PROCESS OF SELF
"When we're pulled in a thousand directions, striving to please everyone, yearning for universal approval, and unable to tolerate even a single rejection, we subject ourselves to a harmful and toxic stress that can lead to a dissonance between our true selves and the persona imposed by others upon us. This persona imposes goals and lifestyles incompatible with our authentic selves, guiding us down dark paths and blind alleys, making us feel unwell. We resist, we persevere, yet at the same time, we feel a strong sense of emptiness and exhaustion—internal exhaustion stemming from overwriting the pages of our daily lives, pages that aren't ours, that we didn't choose, and that we feel don't belong to us. Success lies not in pursuing something extrinsic, but only in what stems from our own, and only our own, personal and unequivocal decision."
Try to imagine what it means to spend an entire lifetime trying to attract attention. Consider how it might make a person feel when they can't connect with others for who they truly are—a life spent craving the success that many desire but few achieve. It's a destabilizing rage and profound frustration, manifesting in extreme and irrational acts that can jeopardize the stability of one's future life. Trying to be someone you're not for someone else's benefit is the most serious act of self-harm a person can commit—a mistake that can cause the disintegration of one's already fragile identity, an act of sublime masochistic self-injury that results in the fragmentation of the self to the point where looking in the mirror prompts the question of who one truly is because it won't be known for certain. A face cut into four parts and asymmetrically arranged on the stage, crying blood, highly transfigured into a puppet and abstractly depicted and disfigured from its identity. An identity as an individual and as a social person, ceasing to exist because it's not recognized by anyone. Everything distorted and on the verge of fragmenting, decomposing, and vanishing into nothingness—the same nothingness that has long plagued the unfortunate subject internally, like an incurable ailment devouring them from within, in the invisibility of their existence and the indifference of others. Losing touch with one's self and living in a loop of stereotyped actions is an insult to the creativity and beauty of the individual in the uniqueness of their expression.
Link to the artwork:
https://www.irevals.com/gallery/fragmentation-process-of-self
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