a note on being self-absorbed
Sometimes I wake up early in the morning, or stay up really late at night, and think about what my life would be like if I were a different person. If I lived alone in a studio apartment, or if my favorite food was asparagus, or if I had never been to a concert. I wonder about if I didn’t like dogs, or if I had been raised by my dad instead of my mom, or if I were lactose intolerant and couldn’t eat cheese or ice cream, or if I didn’t have a place to live. How would I carry myself? What are the things I would say to people when they asked about my parents, or how I felt every time I realized that of all the things I could eat, I would not be able to eat cheese?
When I was younger, I was really into watching YouTube videos. I especially loved to watch videos of kids not much older than me, doing things that were only slightly more impressive than what I was currently doing. Things like putting together homemade music videos or instrument tutorials(and actually getting views). I was particularly interested in videos from a channel called “lexxnsydd”; the channel belonged to two girls that were a little older than me, and yet they seemed so much more ambitious, and, above all, they were famous. Well, kind of famous. They had a couple hundred thousand views on their videos, which to me at the time seemed an insurmountable number of people. For context, the most views any of my own YouTube videos ever got hovered around fifty. Maybe seventy-five.
I didn’t like to watch lexxnsydd’s videos because I wanted to be them, I watched them because I liked to imagine what it would be like to be their friend. I wondered how they would give me a makeover, and what part I would play in their next music video, and I liked to think about having sleepovers with them in their awesome looking basements. How would I as a person change if I suddenly were in their lives? They reminded me of the girls I knew at school — pretty and confident and never afraid to laugh out loud in front of people like I was.
I read this quote once that said “the person you think of as yourself exists only for you and even you don’t know who that is. Everyone else creates versions of ‘you’ in their heads. You’re not the same person to anyone. There are thousands of versions of you out there.” It’s a strange thought to consider, especially because I have spent so much of my life critiquing myself at each point of change. I think of the ways I have changed my handwriting, and the music I don’t like to listen to anymore, and how I felt when I drank moonshine for the first time and threw up black into the snow. I think about the person who did those things, and how long I have spent trying to understand the ways I stopped being that person. When I’m getting to know someone new, I tend to talk about myself a lot, because I want so badly for the person to understand me at exactly the point at which I currently understand myself.
As naturally as being introspective about myself may come to me, it’s always been so difficult for me to understand that no matter how I personally feel or what I do to describe myself, people form their own opinions. That’s what the quote above is really talking about, right? That no matter what you do, people see you in lights shaded by their own experience. So that my friend Emily Hennegan from high school remembers me for Chinese class and writing Spongebob quotes on the chalk board, and Kevin from college remembers the talk we had on the bench outside our dorm not for how much I felt heartbroken, but for how I had brought out a piece of paper with me so I wouldn’t forget what to say, and for how I stayed strong and told him I didn’t want him to be friends and for how he winced a little at that. And the guys I refused to have sex with remember me not for how I felt strong in pushing their hands away, but for how it felt for them when I said no. And my cousin Juliet remembers those videos we took when we were thirteen and ten not for how I looked compared to her, but for how she looked compared to me.
The truth is, I don’t know most of the time what people think of me. I can read social cues, but I’ve never been very good at being considerate, and sometimes I just assume someone is on the same page as me when they aren’t. It’s caused a lot of problems in a lot of my relationships, especially in the closer-knit ones. I just spend so much time trying to understand myself that I leave little time of trying to understand other people. I know no one knows themselves perfectly. And it’s even harder to understand other people perfectly, because you’re not there for every tiny second of influence in another person’s life. There’s no way of knowing what tiny moment is going to stay in a person’s mind. I still think about the time when I was eleven and taking horse-back riding lessons for the first time, when the girl who was helping me get into the saddle huffed because I wasn’t moving fast enough. Not often, but sometimes. I wonder what she thought of me when that happened.
To bring this back full circle, the things I wonder about at night and in the morning, aren’t that far-fetched at all when I really think about it. There are surely people out there who know me, but think that I do like asparagus. Or people who have seen me get annoyed at a dog and think that I don’t like dogs. Or that have never seen me eat dairy, and might assume that I am lactose intolerant. Or who have no idea where I live, or what parent raised me. In other words, there are a thousand versions of me out there, in other people’s brains, that aren’t the same as the exact version of myself that I have come to understand. That’s pretty weird. But also strangely comforting.
When I was younger, I was really into watching YouTube videos. I especially loved to watch videos of kids not much older than me, doing things that were only slightly more impressive than what I was currently doing. Things like putting together homemade music videos or instrument tutorials(and actually getting views). I was particularly interested in videos from a channel called “lexxnsydd”; the channel belonged to two girls that were a little older than me, and yet they seemed so much more ambitious, and, above all, they were famous. Well, kind of famous. They had a couple hundred thousand views on their videos, which to me at the time seemed an insurmountable number of people. For context, the most views any of my own YouTube videos ever got hovered around fifty. Maybe seventy-five.
I didn’t like to watch lexxnsydd’s videos because I wanted to be them, I watched them because I liked to imagine what it would be like to be their friend. I wondered how they would give me a makeover, and what part I would play in their next music video, and I liked to think about having sleepovers with them in their awesome looking basements. How would I as a person change if I suddenly were in their lives? They reminded me of the girls I knew at school — pretty and confident and never afraid to laugh out loud in front of people like I was.
I read this quote once that said “the person you think of as yourself exists only for you and even you don’t know who that is. Everyone else creates versions of ‘you’ in their heads. You’re not the same person to anyone. There are thousands of versions of you out there.” It’s a strange thought to consider, especially because I have spent so much of my life critiquing myself at each point of change. I think of the ways I have changed my handwriting, and the music I don’t like to listen to anymore, and how I felt when I drank moonshine for the first time and threw up black into the snow. I think about the person who did those things, and how long I have spent trying to understand the ways I stopped being that person. When I’m getting to know someone new, I tend to talk about myself a lot, because I want so badly for the person to understand me at exactly the point at which I currently understand myself.
As naturally as being introspective about myself may come to me, it’s always been so difficult for me to understand that no matter how I personally feel or what I do to describe myself, people form their own opinions. That’s what the quote above is really talking about, right? That no matter what you do, people see you in lights shaded by their own experience. So that my friend Emily Hennegan from high school remembers me for Chinese class and writing Spongebob quotes on the chalk board, and Kevin from college remembers the talk we had on the bench outside our dorm not for how much I felt heartbroken, but for how I had brought out a piece of paper with me so I wouldn’t forget what to say, and for how I stayed strong and told him I didn’t want him to be friends and for how he winced a little at that. And the guys I refused to have sex with remember me not for how I felt strong in pushing their hands away, but for how it felt for them when I said no. And my cousin Juliet remembers those videos we took when we were thirteen and ten not for how I looked compared to her, but for how she looked compared to me.
The truth is, I don’t know most of the time what people think of me. I can read social cues, but I’ve never been very good at being considerate, and sometimes I just assume someone is on the same page as me when they aren’t. It’s caused a lot of problems in a lot of my relationships, especially in the closer-knit ones. I just spend so much time trying to understand myself that I leave little time of trying to understand other people. I know no one knows themselves perfectly. And it’s even harder to understand other people perfectly, because you’re not there for every tiny second of influence in another person’s life. There’s no way of knowing what tiny moment is going to stay in a person’s mind. I still think about the time when I was eleven and taking horse-back riding lessons for the first time, when the girl who was helping me get into the saddle huffed because I wasn’t moving fast enough. Not often, but sometimes. I wonder what she thought of me when that happened.
To bring this back full circle, the things I wonder about at night and in the morning, aren’t that far-fetched at all when I really think about it. There are surely people out there who know me, but think that I do like asparagus. Or people who have seen me get annoyed at a dog and think that I don’t like dogs. Or that have never seen me eat dairy, and might assume that I am lactose intolerant. Or who have no idea where I live, or what parent raised me. In other words, there are a thousand versions of me out there, in other people’s brains, that aren’t the same as the exact version of myself that I have come to understand. That’s pretty weird. But also strangely comforting.
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