Pretending can be helpful for learning. For example, if I am going to learn Japanese, it would help me to imagine during the lessons that I am a ninja. That will connect emotions with the information, which should make the brain learn faster and remember better. -- On the other hand, scolding me “you are not a ninja, you are not even a Japanese person, so stop pretending to be one” anytime I open the Japanese textbook would harm my efforts.
Also, there is this thing about attribution. Of course my estimates about how well do I role-play a socially skilled person are seriously biased. But so are the estimates of people who know me for a long time! They look at me and they don’t see the “today-me”; they see the “remembered-me” acting out of its usual role. (Strangers assume that the “today-me” is my typical behavior, whether good or bad.) Maybe I pretend to be a funny person, but I do it wrong and it’s awkward. But maybe I pretend to be a funny person and I do it right… but my old friends still feel awkward, because they know it’s not the “me” they know, so they will give me a negative feedback anyway.
It is difficult to keep your identity small if there are people around you who maintain it for you.
This may be specific for me: I am kind of a chameleon in my behavior. I instinctively feel what other people expect from me, and I start behaving that way. It is not conscious; behaving that way just feels natural when I am with the person, and it is difficult to change. With different people I behave differently, although within some limits. So when someone tells me to “be myself”, I want to scream at them that what they see as “myself” is simply “myself in their presence, acting according to their expectations”, but in a different situation I could be different; that I often already had an experience of behaving the other way, it’s just hard to replicate for some reasons (e.g. there were people who made me act like that, but I lost contact with them and can’t find a replacement). But I don’t say that, because it sounds silly, and it would be blaming another person for something that is my responsibility, and they probably couldn’t fix it for me anyway. I just consider the “be yourself” advice to be actively harmful. The beauty of meeting new people is that I only have to role-play the given behavior successfully once; then they assume this is “myself”, and then I can behave like this naturally with them. This is how I learned to be a funny person, a wise person, a self-confident person, an attractive person, a leader; in some specific contexts, but then I can experiment with expanding it to other contexts. Making me believe that I should not pretend to be someone I am not (in other people’s opinion) would be like cutting out of my brain the part responsible for self-improvement. In a paradoxical way, pretending to be someone I’m not is an important part of “being myself (as I see myself)”, so telling me to “be myself” is not really helpful in making me be myself.
Pretending can be helpful for learning. For example, if I am going to learn Japanese, it would help me to imagine during the lessons that I am a ninja. That will connect emotions with the information, which should make the brain learn faster and remember better. -- On the other hand, scolding me “you are not a ninja, you are not even a Japanese person, so stop pretending to be one” anytime I open the Japanese textbook would harm my efforts.
Also, there is this thing about attribution. Of course my estimates about how well do I role-play a socially skilled person are seriously biased. But so are the estimates of people who know me for a long time! They look at me and they don’t see the “today-me”; they see the “remembered-me” acting out of its usual role. (Strangers assume that the “today-me” is my typical behavior, whether good or bad.) Maybe I pretend to be a funny person, but I do it wrong and it’s awkward. But maybe I pretend to be a funny person and I do it right… but my old friends still feel awkward, because they know it’s not the “me” they know, so they will give me a negative feedback anyway.
It is difficult to keep your identity small if there are people around you who maintain it for you.
This may be specific for me: I am kind of a chameleon in my behavior. I instinctively feel what other people expect from me, and I start behaving that way. It is not conscious; behaving that way just feels natural when I am with the person, and it is difficult to change. With different people I behave differently, although within some limits. So when someone tells me to “be myself”, I want to scream at them that what they see as “myself” is simply “myself in their presence, acting according to their expectations”, but in a different situation I could be different; that I often already had an experience of behaving the other way, it’s just hard to replicate for some reasons (e.g. there were people who made me act like that, but I lost contact with them and can’t find a replacement). But I don’t say that, because it sounds silly, and it would be blaming another person for something that is my responsibility, and they probably couldn’t fix it for me anyway. I just consider the “be yourself” advice to be actively harmful. The beauty of meeting new people is that I only have to role-play the given behavior successfully once; then they assume this is “myself”, and then I can behave like this naturally with them. This is how I learned to be a funny person, a wise person, a self-confident person, an attractive person, a leader; in some specific contexts, but then I can experiment with expanding it to other contexts. Making me believe that I should not pretend to be someone I am not (in other people’s opinion) would be like cutting out of my brain the part responsible for self-improvement. In a paradoxical way, pretending to be someone I’m not is an important part of “being myself (as I see myself)”, so telling me to “be myself” is not really helpful in making me be myself.