perception
When I was nineteen I asked the girl I was sort of but not really seeing to describe me, because that's the sort of thing you do when you're an insecure teen, and she told me I was always smiling and it looked like something was wrong when I wasn't. This struck me as slightly odd, because smiling isn't really my default mode of being1, but only slightly, because, you know, I could at least imagine that maybe I smiled a lot when she was around because, you know, she made me happy. It was easy enough to imagine that this was some unique mode of being that I had when she was around. So I didn't think about it much.
Many years later I heard a secondhand account of what someone else had said about me: "Oh, I like that person, they're happy-go-lucky," and that was weird. I'm not. I'm not a font of misery and despair, but "happy-go-lucky" is just not a description that describes me. And then I realized what is actually happening: when I'm outside, I squint in a way that looks a lot like a smile. So to this guy it looked like I was just always riding my bike around with this big stupid smile on my face, so happy just to be here.
And then I started wondering if that was something that was going on before. If maybe we just spent enough time in situations where the light was bright enough that my default resting expression looked like a big dumb smile, that this was how she started to perceive me, as a person. I couldn't possibly tell you, now, but it's amazing to think that even for those who are close to you, there can exist these barriers that prevent you from ever being truly perceived.
I had a friend in Boston who, at a party, was explaining that he could pretty reliably tell what color Magic decks people played when he got to know them pretty well. As an example he looked over to me, looked me in the eye, and said, "Like, you play green/black, right?"
Reader, I had never played Magic: The Gathering.2
I said as much, and he just kind of made a surprised noise and moved on, because that's just what you do when a cold read fails. And maybe other people would forget this exchange, but it always played on my mind, because here we had an oddly unfalsifiable cold read, a perception that could only be proven with a counterfactual. Would the version of me that played Magic prior to having that exchange have played green/black? It's impossible to say, and now I had his divination in my mind, my perception would always be warped. If I started playing Magic and ended up with a green/black deck, I could never be satisfied that I didn't do this because of what he said. Nor could I be convinced that if I picked something else it wouldn't have been because I felt compelled to act against this act of perception.
And it has extended to other things, as well. You will be unsurprised, for instance, that I have always had an affinity for Ghost types in Pokemon, but what of my abiding fondness for Grass types? Was that influenced by this declaration, as well? Did I like them before this happened?
This is, of course, mostly light-hearted, but there is an immense power in perceiving someone. These stories have lingered in my brain for years, little fragments of those times that this whole dance of perceiving and being perceived was made explicit, gave me something concrete to focus on, to think about, to wonder just how much power other people have to change who we are.