Art postcard (top – The Cocktail Party by Charlie White)
used as a prompt for client artwork
(below – sharpie and stickers)
shown here with permission.
A client looked at this photograph of a life-sized art installation depicting an alien at a cocktail party. It clicked. A perfect metaphor for their social anxiety; not fitting in. A lifetime, in fact, of feeling different, weird, out of place. This client talked about feeling naked and exposed and lost in a world of “normies” who ostensibly have their lives together. Who understand what’s going on and what is expected of them. Or at least look like it. Has anybody else ever felt this? Like an Alien at a Cocktail Party?
The client used sharpies to make the background for their follow up sticker collage – recreating the scene from their point of view as the weirdo. They pieced “themselves” together (2nd from left) out of 3 randomly put together parts. Not a humanoid shape like all the others. Completely different looking! Even wrong! Coincidentally though this client has illustrated an old, wise principle about what happens when we compare ourselves to others. Most of the time when we compare ourselves to other people we are comparing our insides (to which we are privy) to their outsides (which is all we can see of them) – in effect making our comparison null and void by definition. It is a set-up where we can only come out with a distorted conclusion. Check it out above. The others at the party are a mess if you look closer. The first (left to right) is dead inside! After “themselves” we see a heavily armored and closed off man, next some one that has a mind/body disconnect. The next guy is a scary bully. The Samurai is completely lost in his warrior persona and the two nude archers are just randomly shooting arrows seemingly with no plan.
One huge component of social anxiety is believing that everyone else is confident and capable – that they know something we “aliens” don’t know. When we take time to challenge this mistaken idea we see that in many cases “they” are just like us – they may LOOK comfortable, but inside they feel very much like we do – insecure, defensive and scared. And remember what it says in The Desiderata – when we compare we can only become bitter or vain.