Food for Thought: Seeing Yourself
how many versions of yourself are actually out there?
I do.
For starters…
- There’s me as I know myself now.
- There’s the defiant, fuck-you version of me from when I was 17–18 ish.
- Then you’ve got the depressed, burdensome, nobody-would-care-if-I-was gone persona right before the angsty defiance.
- There’s the toddler who used to bang her head on the floor and throw crazy absurd temper tantrums.
AND so many other iterations of who I was before the woman I am today. I suspect there will be many more renditions of me as life presses on as some versions went out of style faster than others, while a few were more like a software update than a complete device exchange.
The introspection of it all really makes me grateful for the perspective I’ve gained along the way. A deep sense of gratitude for every single version of me that I’ve ever lived and experienced sets in with a peaceful joy.
And yet, the versions of me that live in my own head are just one piece of the pie. Arguably the most important, though still just one piece.
The way you see me isn’t the same way I see myself, which isn’t the same way someone else sees me. You (and anyone else who knows I exist) created your own perception of who I am, what I sound like, how I look, what I think and feel… etc. It’s what we do. Human brains take in information and draw conclusions based on our experiences to help us make connections and inferences.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading about unconscious bias, and in short, unconscious biases are assumptions. Understanding assumptions this way and how the brain processes the overwhelming amount of data and stimulants we receive in any given moment helped me conceptualize the feeling of being misunderstood in a way that hadn’t occurred to me before.
Every time I’ve felt misunderstood by someone — even someone I love and care for very much — it’s because they made assumptions about me, and I about them. And those assumptions clouded the true intent of the interaction. EVEN in good, solid, wholesome relationships… and perhaps ESPECIALLY in the deep, long-standing ones.
For example, I’ve walked away from interactions and found myself being described as annoyed and intense by one onlooker and passionate and urgent by another. Both who know me well, care for me richly, and value me deeply. Sure, you have the nuance in vocabulary — the connotation wrapped up in certain words for certain people — and you have the different experiences and data that exists in each of their brains informing how they’re internalizing my facial expressions, tone of voice, body movements and my own vocabulary that informs their perceptions and of course their own vocabulary.
All of that to say, no one is right. No one is wrong. They get to see me in the light they see me, and that’s that.
What beauty there is in a person who seeks to understand you as you see yourself, challenges you to consider viewing beyond your current gaze, and practices patient objectivity in knowing you.
