Actor and Mirror in Performance
‘At some point, the need to be accepted is born. Before that, we don’t care whether we are accepted or not. People’s opinions are not important, because we just want to play, and we live in the present. The fear of not getting a reward becomes the fear of rejection, the fear of not being good enough for someone else is what makes us try to change and create an image. Then, we try to project that image according to what they want us to be, just to be accepted, just to have the reward. We learn to pretend to be what we are not, and we practice being someone else. We practice and practice, and we master how to be what we are not. Soon, we forget who we really are, and we start to live our images. We create not just one image, but many different images according to the different groups of people we associate with, We create an image at home, an image at school, and when we grow up we create even more images. This is also true for a simple relationship between a man and a woman. The woman has an outer image that she tries to project to others, but when she is alone she has another image of herself. The man also has an outer image and an inner image. By the time they are adults, the inner image and the outer image are so different that they hardly match anymore. In a relationship between a man and a woman, there are four images at least…how can they really know each other? They don’t. They can only try to understand the image.’ (Ruiz, 1999, 24)
Works Cited:
Ruiz, D. (1999) the Mastery of Love. USA: Amber-Allen Publishing.