1,000 words about 1,000 facets
Take a single person and look at their life at any one point. What do you see? What does it tell you? Is there ever enough information in one moment to even begin to outline someone?
I wonder what the people I used to know think of me now, if they do at all. Even if they imagine me having grown up, there's no way to see all the twists and turns that end up making us who we are.
I wonder about the people who I've known for years who have seen me at fixed intervals. Two years later, three years later, now. If you don't see the path, do you see the end result differently? Would I see those friends differently if I knew what they had been through to end up where they are? More importantly, if I had actually seen them go through it?
When I planned to move here, I thought a lot about how I would tell my story, and how frightening it was to think of doing so - or to think of *not* doing so. I talked about the fear inherent in the possibilities. It's odd to think, when you meet someone, of the force and weight of the entirety of each of your pasts coming to rest at this one moment. I am the totality of everything that has ever happened to me, and everything I have ever done - but you can't present it all at once. I was intimidated by the possibility of becoming someone else just by the simple act of leaving out some of my stories. I was intimidated by the knowledge that I could manipulate my past.
I forget, frequently, what stories I've told and what I haven't. With people with whom I feel comfortable, I often assume that I've told almost all my stories - with people with whom I am reserved, I assume the opposite. Neither is ever true, of course, and so I'm just always surprised at what people do and don't know about me.
After all, I wear my heart on my sleeve and I write my life story on my livejournal. It seems impossible that I am anything other than an open book, but when I look into my past, I see shit there that *I* didn't know about. There is nobody in the world who knows all of my stories. There is nobody who sees all of who I am. It's the nature of life and human interaction.
It's Escher-esque to think about, though, or at least it is for me. I start trying to see myself as other people, with their particular subset of me-knowledge, must see me, which becomes an exercise first and foremost in trying to see how other people see, and then reflect myself in that light, and it just becomes impossibly complicated and inverted.
Right there is one of the reasons for the attention-seeking, anyway, most especially the "tell me what you think of me" posts. If there's one thing that's blatantly clear from my confessions posts, it's that a variety of people see me in pretty much diametrically opposed ways. And I wonder *why*, exactly - not just the most basic facts of "hey, why do you hate me?" and "hey, why do you not?", but the underlying cause - what facet are these people seeing that these other people are completely not seeing, and is it intentional on my part?
I am inclined to think that at some level, it is. I don't believe that the people who hate me were ever my friends. I don't think I ever reached out to them in any significant way. I think that the most they ever saw of my life was a series of still points. Somehow, they just got the bad ones. I don't really know what that implies, except that I don't particularly mind that they don't like me. It is still an interesting puzzle, though.
As I write more and more of my stories, I am seized by the impulse to print them all out and shuffle them like cards. Deal myself out a hand and see who it paints a picture of. Does it feel like me? Do these five moments begin to make up the person I actually am? Would someone else see me in this?
Twenty minutes into writing this, I realize I have "Blower's Daughter" (the song from Closer) in my head and I realize this has been brewing since I saw the movie. Well, it's been brewing longer than that, obviously, given last year's post, but it kicked a lot of these musings up for me again.
The thing that makes the movie both interesting and uncomfortable is that, over a period of several years of these four people's lives, it gives us only the moments when they are acting awful toward each other. You must assume that there is more than that, as they stay together and find worthwhile things in each other, but we're not allowed to see that; we're given only the despicable moments, the brutal and painful and cruel moments, and expected to divine a character out of that, but there are no real characters. They are caricatures simply by virtue of the fact that we are shown exactly one (1) aspect of their personalities, at the most extreme points of bad behavior. We have to imagine their good qualities if we wish to see them as human, which makes it especially hard to understand why they're all so stupidly in love with each other.
I suspect that anyone could make anything they want out of my life. I believe most of my life has been good. I believe I have acted rightly most of the time. I believe 9 out of 10 ex-boyfriends would recommend me to a new boyfriend, though it's possible they would include a warning. But I have no illusions about the fact that I've made enough mistakes to write a book on. Shuffle the facts of my life, and I could be anyone.
Chances are, so could you.
I wonder what the people I used to know think of me now, if they do at all. Even if they imagine me having grown up, there's no way to see all the twists and turns that end up making us who we are.
I wonder about the people who I've known for years who have seen me at fixed intervals. Two years later, three years later, now. If you don't see the path, do you see the end result differently? Would I see those friends differently if I knew what they had been through to end up where they are? More importantly, if I had actually seen them go through it?
When I planned to move here, I thought a lot about how I would tell my story, and how frightening it was to think of doing so - or to think of *not* doing so. I talked about the fear inherent in the possibilities. It's odd to think, when you meet someone, of the force and weight of the entirety of each of your pasts coming to rest at this one moment. I am the totality of everything that has ever happened to me, and everything I have ever done - but you can't present it all at once. I was intimidated by the possibility of becoming someone else just by the simple act of leaving out some of my stories. I was intimidated by the knowledge that I could manipulate my past.
I forget, frequently, what stories I've told and what I haven't. With people with whom I feel comfortable, I often assume that I've told almost all my stories - with people with whom I am reserved, I assume the opposite. Neither is ever true, of course, and so I'm just always surprised at what people do and don't know about me.
After all, I wear my heart on my sleeve and I write my life story on my livejournal. It seems impossible that I am anything other than an open book, but when I look into my past, I see shit there that *I* didn't know about. There is nobody in the world who knows all of my stories. There is nobody who sees all of who I am. It's the nature of life and human interaction.
It's Escher-esque to think about, though, or at least it is for me. I start trying to see myself as other people, with their particular subset of me-knowledge, must see me, which becomes an exercise first and foremost in trying to see how other people see, and then reflect myself in that light, and it just becomes impossibly complicated and inverted.
Right there is one of the reasons for the attention-seeking, anyway, most especially the "tell me what you think of me" posts. If there's one thing that's blatantly clear from my confessions posts, it's that a variety of people see me in pretty much diametrically opposed ways. And I wonder *why*, exactly - not just the most basic facts of "hey, why do you hate me?" and "hey, why do you not?", but the underlying cause - what facet are these people seeing that these other people are completely not seeing, and is it intentional on my part?
I am inclined to think that at some level, it is. I don't believe that the people who hate me were ever my friends. I don't think I ever reached out to them in any significant way. I think that the most they ever saw of my life was a series of still points. Somehow, they just got the bad ones. I don't really know what that implies, except that I don't particularly mind that they don't like me. It is still an interesting puzzle, though.
As I write more and more of my stories, I am seized by the impulse to print them all out and shuffle them like cards. Deal myself out a hand and see who it paints a picture of. Does it feel like me? Do these five moments begin to make up the person I actually am? Would someone else see me in this?
Twenty minutes into writing this, I realize I have "Blower's Daughter" (the song from Closer) in my head and I realize this has been brewing since I saw the movie. Well, it's been brewing longer than that, obviously, given last year's post, but it kicked a lot of these musings up for me again.
The thing that makes the movie both interesting and uncomfortable is that, over a period of several years of these four people's lives, it gives us only the moments when they are acting awful toward each other. You must assume that there is more than that, as they stay together and find worthwhile things in each other, but we're not allowed to see that; we're given only the despicable moments, the brutal and painful and cruel moments, and expected to divine a character out of that, but there are no real characters. They are caricatures simply by virtue of the fact that we are shown exactly one (1) aspect of their personalities, at the most extreme points of bad behavior. We have to imagine their good qualities if we wish to see them as human, which makes it especially hard to understand why they're all so stupidly in love with each other.
I suspect that anyone could make anything they want out of my life. I believe most of my life has been good. I believe I have acted rightly most of the time. I believe 9 out of 10 ex-boyfriends would recommend me to a new boyfriend, though it's possible they would include a warning. But I have no illusions about the fact that I've made enough mistakes to write a book on. Shuffle the facts of my life, and I could be anyone.
Chances are, so could you.