Foolish Sunday

Again I've had to learn the lesson that it's sometimes better not to know what other people are thinking about you.

It's a bizarre world that we live in. Our sense of self, our self identity, is developed through our interactions with others. Yet if we allow our identities to be developed entirely upon what other people think of us then we could end up with a very distorted sense of who we are. Some people really like us, some do not. Some think we are proud, others humble. Some think we are attractive, others do not. Really in this world there is so much subjectivity that if the determination or agreement upon every matter of opinion had to be reached then we should just live in a world of all is null and void. No opinion matters and nothing matters.

But we live in this world where there has to be a balance of identification with others points of view and our own, a reconciliation of the facts so to speak. When one side of the equation becomes unbalanced then all sorts of grievous errors in judgement can take place.

There also has to be a balance between what we let other people know about us, what we tell the world, reveal and what is kept hidden. If all were laid bare then the thought is that other people could then make a fair judgement of who we are and their opinion of us would be valid. In point of fact though it is impossible to outline and relay all that there is to know about our lives, our past, our motivations. In some sense we can find that while one person understands what we are relating, another person does not and that has a lot to do with their background, familial and experiential.

The process of forming relationships is tenuous, especially when you tend to overthink things like I do. It is extremely upsetting to get wrapped up in a misinterpretation of someone else's words and motivations, especially third hand.

I spent a rather foolish day crying and being upset on Sunday. I'm not proud of the way I handled the perception that someone I cared about thinks of me as a manipulative know it all. I don't even know if that's true. What is true is that I don't have any idea what other people truly think about me, and I probably am better off not knowing.

SG