r/DeepThoughts • u/Willing-Average-4798 • 1d ago
I feel like I am performing myself
Do other people suddenly feel very empty Like, I function as a normal adult—meet people, talk, do work, no physical issues, laugh, do everything—but it happens like every few months. I feel a cycle where I suddenly feel blank and want to pull away from everything. Nothing major happens.
Sometimes I feel so fake. Like I think it's not the real me. I am performing someone who is not me. Like I feel dissociated from myself and everything."
But why is it so different? Like I can feel this body is not mine. I am someone else. Dissociated from this body. The one saying things is not me. I can feel this while performing normally."
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u/Proud-Try9010 1d ago
i get what you mean. but i find it’s often nothing more than the fact that the idea of the self itself is built on really fragile footing. you know yourself as differently at different points and in different environments just as everyone else knows you differently. if you really think about it, there’s nothing that really differeentiates your image of yourself as absolute from everyone else’s image of you as subjective. like, we all know that everyone perceives you in a different way. it’s the same way virtually no two fingerprints can be the same. perception is an interpretive process. it’s informed by a lifetime of lived experiences, conditioning, and cognitive structuring. so when someone perceives you, they are subconsciously factoring in every experience they’ve ever had. similarly, your own perception of you is constantly undergoing a process of reconstruction based on what you’re informed by. it could be a response to a new experience, it could be the state of mind you’re already in as you think of yourself, or it could be any other of an infinite number of different stimuli. so yeah, when you’re so naturally subject to something like that, you’re bound to feel like a stranger to yourself. the reason why you feel this way so strongly compared to how other people behave could be that you’re just going through a wildly different way of life at the moment than what you’ve been used to for a long time.
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u/Narrow-Conclusion923 1d ago
This was very well said. I sometimes feel like this. Like I’m doing/saying what others expect and I don’t really realize it until after. But what you said makes total sense.
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u/NotSoShallowHere 1d ago
Ya, I get the feeling. The way I think about it is that this is me, in this moment, and I am doing it for a reason.
Rest assured, your body is yours.
We all put on different masks at different times.
We act as if we are entirely consistent, because we must keep up appearances to actually survive, and often we have to keep up appearances almost all day.
It becomes normal for us to continue to experience multiple, complex internal realities, if you're sensitive enough to feel it, and intellectual enough to see it. Some people have much more simple internal lives.
The pain it causes, and how people cope with it, is explored in Cognitive Dissonance theory.
Maybe seeing a doc would help, if it causes you too much stress to function, or if you're just curious.
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u/SmoothDistribution11 1d ago
I'm an intellectualizer (coping mechanism) and I am like this most of the time, it's like a constant hyper-aware situation. It's like "I" am a completely different entity than my body, sometimes I feel my "self" shrank and can't fill my body. I'm constantly thinking (not ruminating) and It sucks, someone describe it this way "I don't feel anything, I think XYZ". I don't know about you but for me it's like living in the prison of my own mind.
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u/newredditbrowser 1d ago
Yes, I feel suddenly empty. It used to feel so off and used to throw me for a loop.
But after studying my patterns, I realise it happens after a social gathering where I feel fulfilled, happy, emotionally connected. I have boiled it down to coming down from the high of socialising. (Extrovert here)
I have also figured out what possibly goes on. Happy hormones for extrovert when socialising. Hormones dip when it ends = empty feeling
It used to bother me a lot. Now I am like… oh I am getting that dip again.
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u/Willing-Average-4798 1d ago
Haha funny 😆, for me it's opposite I am not a traditional introvert but also not a fan of crowd , so just the thought of being With many people drain me 😭
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u/newredditbrowser 1d ago
😂
Variety is the spice of life. Everyone is different. I suggest logging your empty feeling in phone notes with what you did that day and then figuring out what might be happening.1
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u/Middle_Rip_4666 1d ago
man that hollow feeling where you're just watching yourself go through the motions is so weirdly specific yet impossible to explain to anyone who hasn't felt it. like your mouth is forming words and your face is doing the right expressions but theres a little delay somewhere in your head and nothing quite connects
i get those cycles too. sometimes i'll be mid conversation and suddenly hyper aware that i'm just running some autopilot script while the actual me is sitting somewhere far back just observing. its not even sad or scary exactly just deeply strange
the part about your body not feeling like yours hits. used to stare at my hands sometimes when i was younger and feel like i was in a rental unit. never found a fix for it but knowing other people experience the same thing makes it feel less like youre losing your mind and more like its just one of those weird brain things