The second move of the machine is to have a persona, or personality… the one everyone knows.
Independent, strong willed, smart, knowledgeable, pretty, nice, creative… all lies.
You paint those over everything to hide that you are not that: you are a real person suffering from no freedom to be yourself, to be any way you want to be: you have to be nice, you have to be smart, you have to be independent… etc.
This second move was borne out of incidents where you fell short of being a match to life. From incidents where you saved the day.
Robin Williams’ machine, the clown machine, ultimately killed him. He was tongue tied, lonely, sad, and an introvert underneath the loud, funny, hyper person he invented to survive as a child.
But your survival tools become a prison, and cause untold sufferings.One of my students decided that the way to make it through life is to be distant, self-protecting, and to keep everyone at arm’s length.As an adult, a mother and grandmother, she