Are You Just a Face with No Soul Behind It?

“I used to love hotels,” says Anna. “Now I’m always in a new apartment or in a hotel somewhere... It makes it easy to leave people.” Oliver looks her in the eyes and says “You can stay in the same place and still find ways to leave people,”  “You are like that?” asks Anna, “It’s what you do?” Oliver nods his head in the affirmative. “So we are the same” says Anna. To which Oliver replies “I guess so.”

From the film Beginners, 2010

Running away from people is the great American Pastime for many of us. We’ve built our lives on running away from ourselves, and we’ve been doing that since we were about five years old. A major problem with running away from one’s self is that it requires us to then run away from everyone. Subconsciously we know that if we can’t face ourselves, we can’t face anyone.

I mean, if we’re not willing to face ourselves, what self do we have to show to someone? We have no sense of self. We’re just a name with a face and a body but not much more. How can we share our real selves with someone if we’ve never shared our real selves with us? We can’t. And so we run.

Problems arise, however, when we run into someone who really means something deeper to us. We want to open up, but we’re afraid of what we might find inside of us. And we’re even more afraid that the other person will reject the real us if we show them more than our face and our body. This is the problem that Anna and Oliver are forced to face in the film Beginners. It’s also the same problem that the characters of Holly Golightly and Paul Varjak were forced to face in the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Anna and Oliver are one in the same. They both run from themselves and others, just in different ways. She physically removes herself from relationships by constantly moving around, while he removes himself from relationships by withdrawing into himself, isolating and being emotionally unavailable. These tactics work at protecting Anna and Oliver from everyone but themselves because these built-in protection mechanisms leave them lonely and sad.

People who suffer from codependency know what it’s like to be constantly on the run from themselves. We know what it’s like to be nothing more than a face that we project to the world—a face with no soul behind it. A very sad face. Underneath that sad face there is an empty void that longs to be filled with intimacy, the sweetest of real, lasting intimacy. But that’s impossible as long as we are running from ourselves.

The solution is as easy as it is hard. We have to stop running from ourselves. Once we stop running and start befriending ourselves, we will begin to know who we are inside. And we will find that we aren’t so horrible as we thought. In fact, we will find a lot of beauty that we have been mistakenly hiding from the world. And once we start allowing that beauty to fill the world around us, we will begin to attract the right people into our lives.

Of course, we will still have the urge to run from them—and ourselves to some degree—and that’s OK as long as we are aware of the urge. Awareness allows us to control the urge to run instead of being controlled by it. Awareness allows us to take the time to grow into being comfortable around other people as we expose our true selves to them. And it allows us to stop running from ourselves and others long enough to enjoy the intimate moments that will one day become a lifetime filled with authentic intimacy and love.