How does a person perceive himself to be?

A person perceives himself according to that which he thinks other people see him as. In better words, a person’s idea of himself…i.e. what he acts like, what he favors and disfavors etc…is created over a matter of time and is affected mainly by the judgment of others. So if a person thinks his friends consider him careless, he will see himself to be that way, whether it is true or not. Since the exchange of perceptions between two or more people is always distorted by ‘noise’ along the passage of communication, this is never true in completion. A person thus always has a different perception of himself than that of what people around him have of him, even though he thinks those two perceptions are the same. That person has molded his perception of himself around those distorted perceptions, and so his own perception is at the same time unique (because it is not an exact copy), and fake (because it is based on income from other people that he has distorted).

The repetitive bombardment of how to act, what to like and not like, and the opinions of peers is more a mass of mixed emotions and affections rather than fixed facts. When someone sits back and reflects on oneself, all these are mutated and tumbled in their mind, so the desired result of how they want to form / alter their character is not a fixed series of statements, but rather a feeling, or effect. If people could communicate using these feelings rather than language, there would not be all this noise distorting the communication line. Then the reflection of a person from the people around him would be clear enough for him to become those reflections (instead of a distorted mirror of them).

This distorted image leads to the phenomena of the self-fulfilling prophecy. Take for example a teenage boy decked with glasses and spotted with freckles. When people perceive him as the nerdy computer geek, they are fixing the mirror image of that which he sees himself to be. Whether they see him that way or not, if he thinks they see him that way, then the perception of himself will become that nerdy computer geek. That person now sets in motion a series of events and choices in his life that lead him towards this expected path, so that he can fulfill the image he is expected to take. He may start studying computers; he may start acting in a manner considered “nerdy” and take up hobbies thought of by others as ‘geeky’ (or rather what he thinks others consider geeky). Thus the stereotype image of spotty teenager wearing glasses becomes that which he himself has created, according to what he thought other people see him as.