How others perceive you
An excerpt from my journal recently:
My brain feels like it's at odds with itself. One side is either logical or arrogant and thinks there is a lot to love about me: I don't think I'm particularly unattractive, I think I'm intelligent and well-informed, I try my best to be kind. The other side of my brain is either self-hating or logical: I only think I'm not unattractive because I am vain, I'm at the top of the curve of knowledge-to-confidence, I am not kind but instead selfish.
I am not arrogant enough to think I'm special — or at least, I know I'm no more special than any other human being — but I wish I knew the truth about myself. I want to know what others really think of me. Being data-driven is a curse because there's not many numbers to crunch regarding the human psyche, so I will never know what kind of person I am.
I write a buncha mumbo jumbo in my journal, but this particular passage has been on my mind for the last few weeks.
The idea that I am not a reliable narrator about myself has always been overwhelming. There are few absolute truths about a person because so much of what we experience and feel is subjective. For instance, using the above as an example, someone I think is attractive may not be attractive to the next person.
What this leads to, however, is this never-ending spiral of feeling like I will never really know myself or how others perceive me. Does it matter? I don't know, and I think that's my main predicament right now.
But on a similar thread, I was talking to my dad today about how there is a coworker of mine who is just a year or two younger than me and just graduated from college. She talks a lot about how I have everything together and how I've really figured out the adult thing, which is laughable to me.
I started thinking, though. Everything I'm stressing out about in that journal entry is about how I will never know how others perceive me, but a perception of me has been handed to me outright, yet I choose to brush it off.
From her point of view, I come to work on time, I have my meal-prepped lunches, I have the answers to all of her questions, and I generally have my shit together at work.
My point of view of all of those things differs. I don't always get to work on time because I sleep through my alarms. I try to meal prep, but it takes hours and sometimes I end up spending a week buying lunch every day. I'm very good at Googling many of the answers to her questions. I do not have my shit together at work, but because she is still learning how to exist in a workplace, it seems like I do.
She sees one side of it, but I see the side that only I get to see when I'm at home. I see the cost of appearing "put together."
Perhaps, even if I did know everyone's averaged-out perception of me, it wouldn't even matter if I didn't personally believe it to be true. If people think I'm a nice person, I'll just go down the rabbit hole of every off-color thing I've said since middle school. If people think I'm attractive, I'll remember looking at every blemish on my body earlier that day. If people think I'm intelligent, I'll recall the last conversation I had when I just nodded along, pretending to understand what the people around me were talking about.
I don't have a resolution or any sort of moral to the story, but it has given me some food for thought. I suppose I should try to listen a little more closely to folks giving me compliments and think of why they see me that way.
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