Insecurities.

The word insecurities comes from the prefix 'In' which means 'not' and the word secure. If we consider the etymology of the word secure, it used to have two meanings, one which encompasses the meaning that we consider today, i.e. without fear of harm, carefree or 'dreading no evil' from the Latin word securus. However, it also had another meaning, which was a negative one in the sense of recklessness and carelessness. 

Insecurity is today considered explicitly negative, but considering the other meaning, how can being free from carelessness be explicitly negative? Considering both poles which make up the definition of the word, I think the word in it's totality represents the careful teeter dance of being cognizant of societal expectations so as to not deceive ourselves, but at the same time not letting Societal expectations make us anxious or dread them. Here, I seek to address the second meaning of insecurity.

Insecurities are what make us want to continuously improve ourselves, our surroundings or our relations. They are nothing but the realisation that we are at present not the person we wish to be or could have been. This realisation can be accepted in an affirmative manner where we seek to continuously improve on the area in question, regardless of what we may be able to acheive. The second approach is one of passivity, which keeps building up to the point where we must adopt one of the two other approaches. The second approach says that "I am self aware of my flaws in this certain area and hence my lack of actualisation of potential can't be criticised". Even though this seems like a bad line of reasoning, it is incredible how many people are able to trick themselves with this bad rationalization. The third approach and probably the most common one is when seeing this gap, we seek to devalue the very thing in question. "math is for nerds" is a typical example of this inversion of values perceived to be "good". If knowing math is a good thing, then why is it that those who are good at it may be outcasted from certain circles at school? "pretty people are shallow" is another common sentiment. It is in most cases a facade for our insecurities of our own appearance, and the will to devalue that which we do not possess and simultaneously increase the value of what we do have.

Insecurities are the areas of our life where we know we are not doing enough and putting up a fake facade which matches up to societal expectations of us or have unresolved issues in but whenever an area of insecurity is poked, the facade is blown. We feel sad then not because of the presence of that insecurity, which we try to deny even after it has been revealed, but rather because revealing of an insecurity forces us to stop deceiving ourselves too.

Whatever work we do in our daily life is to deal with the insecurities of certain spheres of life in a way, however we only give the term insecurities to those areas of our existence which we actively chose to ignore and devalue. When others who value the things we deem "shallow" confront us, we have no choice but to see the difference between someone who puts constant effort into a certain area and someone who chooses to actively ignore it. But the person who we compare ourselves to is not the other person for we may be better than others even without putting in effort, but rather it is the version of ourselves we parted from the day we decided to ignore our insecurities.

The longer we leave insecurities unresolved, the harder it becomes to pull back up. Added to this is the fact that if we begin working on our insecurities after even a small hiatus, The realisation of the wasted time i.e. regret begins gnawing on us. It feels like chasing a shadow we could have been while it continuously sneers back at us. This feeling is also rooted almost entirely in comparison. It is ignorant of the fact that even though we might have done something wrong in the past, the present version of us is all we are, and all we have. Regret will only take you further away from the shadow which appears to be the ideal in the moment.

People may think that a rational confrontation of our insecurities would involve setting a standard or an ideal which we wish to achieve and being content with maintaining that state. That is a lie which has been propagated in society, for we are constantly looking to improve ourselves even when we have met the ideal we set for ourselves. "In acheiving an ideal one thereby surpasses it". If we remove the parts of our lives that consist of coping mechanisms(which are even more numerous in today's society and might even be normalized behaviors), we often see a will for constantly improving the human condition so as to exert our own individuality. When we have actually met our so called "ideal" an insecurity would simply stop bothering us (without us lying to ourselves), until some other changes in our surroundings occur (most probably meeting someone even better than us). However it is very difficult to reach such a stage. The ideals that an honest person sets for themselves are much higher than those which society sets for us. The limit to the potentials of humans is itself unknown.

Social media leads to an unnaturally high amount of social comparison and hence for anyone to use it we must be sold the lie that we should become comfortable without confronting our insecurities. Talking about topics which make people insecure is also considered "rude". In a life without social media we would be meeting or learning about the lives of much lesser people every day and hence any insecurities would have to be immediately dealt with. In this way social media can also in a way be used to hyper charge our improvement. Since social media is here to stay, and we are being constantly reminded of our shortcomings, staying affirmative of our insecurities is almost as difficult and important as confronting them.