We all begin life thinking we're the star of our own show. That we alone create the music of our existence, taking credit for every triumph and bearing the weight of every failure. You were like a soloist, singing on stage, creating the music entirely on your own. You focused on your performance, occasionally glancing at audience reactions. The applause was all for you, so were the cringed expressions as they winced at your mistakes.
Then you became aware of a band playing behind you. At first, you only noticed when something felt wrong, a dissonant chord, a lost beat, a flat note. You glare at the offender. If you could have, you would have sent them from the stage so you could face the audience alone. Instead you try to sing louder to drown out these inharmonious elements. They won’t leave, though. Through it all, the band plays on.
There's more to us than meets the eye. You don’t have to go very far in the study of psychology to know that your consciousness is merely a part of a vast, complicated collection of instincts, desires, traumas, drives, voices, motivations, feelings, behavioral patterns, fears, yearnings, memories, defense mechanisms, archetypal impulses, neurological reflexes, adaptive responses, subconscious beliefs, ancestral echoes, psychological complexes, sensory interpretations, and unprocessed psychological fragments. They all go on playing without your awareness, much less, your conscious direction.
The violas of rational thought play their measured melodies, the brass section of willpower sounds confident and clear. But then something shifts. A hidden timpani of trauma begins to beat an erratic rhythm. Buried deep in the woodwind section, ancestral memories warble and keen, their haunting tones bleeding into the carefully constructed arrangement. Repressed desires crash like cymbals. French horns blare defensive countermelodies, violins scrape out sharp notes that cut through harmony. The bassoons of survival drown out the delicate strings of reason, creating a cacophony of contradictory sounds.
We spend much of our lives either unaware of our internal complexity or actively fighting against it...
