Perspective

The Clash of Seeing

Photo by Andre Mouton on Unsplash

Everyone lives to a certain meaningful degree in their own reality. I’m no exception.

For thousands of years—frankly until roughly the past decade or so—society, at least in the West, has basically agreed that there is one more or less unified reality which we all (most of us, anyway) generally agree on.

Biological sex is a real thing; antisemitism is bad; racism has decreased significantly over time; America is a flawed but grand nation; etc.

All of these social agreements have now been thrown out the cultural window. The Overton Window has changed, on both political sides, and almost always towards the negative, leaning more into our worst human tribal traits.

But the idea of their being multiple realities is not limited to art, culture or politics. It’s also true of each one of us on a personal level.

Anyone who is married or has kids understands this principle inherently. You say something to your spouse, and in your mind you very clearly said A, but, shockingly, you soon (minutes, hours, days later) come to find out your spouse actually heard not A but B…or even G or Z. Said spouse will then react to you based not on what you thought you were saying (from your own POV), but from the perspective of how they interpreted it.

And how any of us interpret anything is, of course, tricky, slippery and endlessly complex.

Because all human beings carry their baggage with them: Familial genes, childhood trauma, environment generally growing up. We all possess minds, obviously. But those minds filter, adjust, alter and translate what someone says or does through the metaphysical coffee grinder that is your own personal and genetic experience and mode of thinking. It’s true, I think, that people in certain trades or professions want to do what they are trained to do: A writer wants to write (possibly this is a curse, especially if you write autobiographically); a surgeon wants to cut up a live body; a psychiatrist wants to prescribe meds; an editor wants to edit; etc.

My point is: We all have these kinds of inherently biased filters inside our minds. If you come from serious trauma, you’re going to view the world through that lens. If you’re an alcoholic, you’ll see the world through that lens. If you’re an abuser, that. A victim, that. Etc. Ad infinitum.

I can’t tell you how many women I briefly dated back in the day before I was married, on the dating apps (God I fucking HATE the dating apps and I’m so glad I’m married and finally off the market!!!) who, to my eye, had very strange and extreme reactions if I, say, didn’t respond to a text fast enough, or if we’d been on a few dates and they discovered I was still on the app, or I didn’t want to talk on the phone for an hour late at night because they felt like talking. Some of these women told me that I was “selfish,” that I “lacked self-awareness,” etc. Yet I’d learned, from their self-divulged histories, that they’d dated abusive men, been cheated on, been treated badly by parents growing up, had gone through physical or sexual abuse, struggled with serious depression, etc.

They were simply seeing their world through their eyes, with their lens and filter and perspective.

I, too, in my past, have had bad reactions, been too sensitive and made ridiculous assertions, been too intense, needy, angry, emotional, etc. I have my issues!

But this is the difference: Self-awareness.

Some people mock the idea of self-awareness; they feel oddly threatened by the very notion of it; they see it as condescending, arrogant, even pretentious.

I just see it as something I’ve always had…for better and very much for worse.

Most serious writers—most serious, talented artists in general—seem to overrepresent when it comes to self-awareness. The very traits we need to create our art are also the traits which, fortunately and unfortunately, are also the traits which make many of us hyper sensitive (guilty as charged!), emotionally fragile and needy, deeply insecure, angry, etc. I’m not saying all artists are this way; I’m saying I think there are certain traits most talented artists possess to varying degrees and in special ways most of the time.

Self-awareness is both a blessing and a curse.

On the positive side of the ledger: It opens up the possibility for more kindness, more empathy, more compassion, more vulnerability, and it often opens these spaces up for others around you. However: It can also make for being a human being in a pretty rough and insensitive world really hard. Most people—thank God—are not artists. If they were society would fall apart: We need builders and construction workers and politicians and doctors and architects and economists and scientists and lawyers, etc. This is crucial for any society to survive, obviously.

But it means that, for the rest of us—the minority of global artists—we’re the outliers. We’re the freaks. We’re the ones who metaphorically color life “outside the lines.” We’re different. We see, feel and think about death all the time. Not necessarily in a morbid way, but in a realistic, inevitable way. This sets us apart right away because most people are working as hard as they can to avoid thinking about death; most people want to keep themselves so profoundly and constantly distracted—in our modern parlance “busy”—that the fear of our ultimate end never creeps up.

Not just that, though. We also can’t help but feel things deeply and acutely, and we can’t help noticing the usually unnoticed; the slight tone change, the minor accent, the miniature, perhaps meaningless (perhaps not) gesture, the specific use of language, certain words, phrases, syntax. We crave attention, love, acceptance and connection…and most of us want it on our terms when we’re ready for it. And we fear it and often push it away. All humans contain ironies, contradictions and inner opposites: We artistic ones are hyper aware of this.

Our art is an expression—The expression—of our fundamental difference from other “normal” people. The things that most people laugh off or shrug off or gesture away: We don’t have that privilege. We see everything, feel everything, are aware of everything. And yet: We can also be highly insensitive to others sometimes, even if we’re self-aware about the fact that what we’re saying is unkind, even cruel.

Most of us, though, know a lot more than you think we do, about ourselves, about you.

Writing is the art of noticing, is it not? Noticing what’s going on within you and without you. Trying to clarify how you feel about those things. Expressing these thoughts and feelings in some shaped form on the page, physical or digital. We’re trying to communicate. That’s what quality writing does, quality art in general: We’re aiming for communication.

Going back to this idea of multiple realities.

This is why, when say a dozen people witness a crime in broad daylight right in front of them, you’ll almost always get a dozen different takes on what just happened. Because we see things, again, through our own unique psychological prism. This also I think explains much of our politics, our polarization. We’re all in our little digital echo-chambers now, our socially isolated bubbles, reading our own preferred realities in newspapers which we have decided are “real” when others are “fake.” We’re literally being fed different realities on a screen by interested parties trying to sell you things and capture your attention.

Buddhism and meditation are helpful here. I used to meditate with a large group in Berkeley when I lived in the Bay Area, under the teacher Jon Kabat Zinn, who is, believe it or not, besides being a meditation teacher and therapist, the grandson of that famous progressive historian, Howard Zinn. (We all read A People’s History of the United States when we were 17 and “hated capitalism.”) Through weekly regular practice, doing silent meditation (“Vipassana”) we learned, slowly over time, to detach in a healthy way from our constantly active, white-noise-inducing, often enigmatic minds. We learned that in silence one finds peace. The act of just being here now is magical, rare and quite splendid. It’s not “satori.” There is no “bliss of total perfection” or “Nirvana.” Personally anyone who claims to find that strikes me as questionable.

But.

What meditation does bring is moments of peace and a detachment from your whirling, spectral thoughts which assault most of us all day every day on and off for all time. We in the West—and especially in the United States—tend to give far too much weight, in my opinion, to our identity. (Read my essay on the silliness of identity here.) We make our identity everything; we “identify” completely with our “identity.” We put ourselves and others into boxes with cheap labels, categorizing and limiting people in the process: White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, male, female, trans, gay, straight, non-binary, etc.

Meditation pushes against this. It asks the question: What is The Self? What is “You?”

We’re so busy trying to force ourselves into a label—woke, anti-woke, republican, democrat, liberal, conservative, libertarian, etc—that we forget the most obvious of eternal truths: We’re all just people, flawed, insecure, wounded human beings who see the world through our own mismanaged and often inaccurate, disordered filters, and who suffer in the same ways with our physical manifestation, our motor-minds, our wants and needs, emotions and desires, fears and failures.

Buddhism teaches that pain stems from clinging and grasping, from wanting things to be different than they are, from a lack of acceptance of our deaths, aka the idea of impermanence. We all know we die. We even know that, for the majority of us, we don’t know how, when, where or why we’ll die. But we know we will.

And yet many of us act as if we won’t die. Yet at the same time we don’t live in the present, we live in the past, the future, anywhere but now. But the truth is: Now is all that ever actually exists, and it is continually, almost instantly becoming the past, this moment, now this moment, now this moment, etc. I do this myself all the time, of course: Live in the past, in the future.

What a bizarre, unlikely miracle it is, for any of us to be here, to be alive, right now, on this unlikely planet whirling round the sun, in 2026. Billions and billions of human beings have come before us, living in much different times, historical periods of famine and plague and zealous religious wars and chaos and kings and undemocratic madness, times where murder and torture were normal, where only rich white propertied men had any power, where one was forced to be a certain religion and was allowed to think and write only about certain things, etc.

Yet we’re here now. Obviously—Iran, Ukraine—the world is far from ideal or perfect right now. But it’s profoundly better than say much of the 20^th century, and vastly better than say 500 years ago. Generally speaking, overall, over time the world has only gotten safer, freer, less poor, more literate, etc. (Makes me think of Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature.)

People who have very little or even no self-awareness are doomed to hurt those around them. Yet they are more set-up for this world we inhabit. Little things don’t bother them. They don’t cry over spilled milk. They don’t rehash over and over what someone said, possibly meant. They don’t spend hours in self-talk trying to “unpack” their complex feelings about something. They stay busy, have thicker skin, and generally shoot from the hip. I envy these people on a certain level.

And yet: I, like us all, can only ever be just what I am. And what I am is a sensitive, self-aware artist. A writer. See what I mean about contradictions: I decry labels and identities and then here I am, embracing the identity of “writer.” The irony, right? This is what my self-awareness gives me: The ability to see my own flaws, weaknesses, hypocrisies. The hardest people to deal with, in my view, are the ones who are neither sensitive, nor deep thinkers, nor compassionate, nor self-aware. Narcissists, control-freaks, serious abusers. People who judge everyone else without being able to fully and accurately see themselves. These people are dangerous.

In many ways my life has been defined (by myself to myself) by my myriad flaws and mistakes. I see the patterns in my own life, past and present: The ways I’ve been cruel, the ways I’ve been selfish, the way I’ve been unkind, the way I’ve tried to control things or people, the self-absorption, the dislocation and alienation, the movement away from love, the fear of being seen and heard when at the same time that’s all I ever want.

Etc.

Like I said it’s a blessing and a curse.

But I couldn’t change it even if I wanted to.

And I don’t.