It’s 1 p.m. on a Friday, and all I’ve done today is get out of bed and move to the couch to doomscroll. I’ve done absolutely nothing productive, and I don’t think I plan to.
It’s my last week of freedom before I have a shitload of editing that needs to get done, so I’m embracing the one week I have where I don’t have to think about writing.
Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of sewing and somehow randomly started doing bead tapestry, as well as diamond art. I’ve become somewhat of a serial hobbyist. I pick up a new hobby, become completely obsessed with it for a while, and then inevitably find something else to occupy my hands.
But that’s not really what I want to talk about.
I think one of the most interesting concepts about being alive is how we can be perceived.
You can be the greatest person alive to someone and someone else’s personal hell. To another person, you might not even exist beyond a brief interaction they had with you once. I find it fascinating, the picture people paint of you in their head, and I often wonder what version of myself I am to them.
Do they really know you? Or do they just know some skewed version of you that they’ve decided to believe?
And which one is right?
Maybe you’re a combination of all of them. Maybe none of them are completely right. Maybe we’re all just fragments of ourselves scattered across the minds of everyone we’ve ever met.
It makes me think that maybe you should be wiser with your words. Not because you should constantly worry about how people perceive you, but because once you give someone a piece of yourself, you have no control over what they do with it.
You can listen to someone talk for years and collect little pieces of information about them—their stories, their habits, their fears, the things they love, the things they hate. But listening isn’t necessarily the same as understanding.
Some people collect the pieces without ever trying to understand how they fit together.
And I think that’s what separates the friends who truly know you from the friends who simply know things about you.
I’ve also been thinking about how some friendships can be filled with envy, with maybe even a little bit of hatred mixed in. Not necessarily because someone is a bad person, but because it’s hard to be genuinely happy for someone when you’re deeply unhappy with yourself.
Sometimes jealousy has very little to do with the person you’re jealous of.
It’s comparison.
You look at someone else and see something you wish you had. Their life. Their confidence. Their relationships. Their opportunities. Their happiness. And instead of feeling happy for them, you feel that little sting of resentment because their existence reminds you of something you feel is missing from your own.
I think, ultimately, a lot of it comes down to insecurity.
Maybe the way people perceive us says just as much about them as it does about us.
Maybe the version of me that exists in your head isn’t really me at all.
Maybe it’s just the version of yourself you needed me to be.