MAN seeks to understand as much as he seeks to be understood. The very foundations of culture, language and religion stem from this basic need. The more we try to contain the universe within the boundaries of an answer, the more it expands, like a tree sprouting branches and bearing the fruit of new questions. So, to keep from growing weary in this never-ending pursuit of answers, we reach out and form connections with others. Unfortunately, what we know of one another are transient pieces of their identities that float through time. Some of these pieces take new forms in the future, while others disappear entirely. Our memories of these pieces, however, remain intact. More often than not, what we know and believe about an individual boils down to the most impactful image we have of them.
We may know someone as being kind, loving and gentle. Yet, no matter how much we try to reason with ourselves, we cannot forget the image of a violent outburst that they may have had in the past, one that shocked us to our very core. So, even as we see this person grow and change before our eyes, we remember them as someone who is capable of the most malicious form of violence, and nothing they might do could change this image of them within our minds. Even if the person were to become different, the idea of them would remain the same to us.
Even the gentlest people can hold the strongest convictions, and these convictions often bloom around their understanding of the people in their lives. As fickle as human beings are, we do not give up our judgements of people quite easily. Some things we cannot forget about people. Some things we can never stop seeing. Some lenses we cannot put down. If we understand the intensity of such convictions and feel justified in holding them, then it must not come as a great surprise that, just as we hold certain permanent images of others, those around us also hold such images of us.
Comfortingly, a permanent image is not always negative. For instance, to a mother, her daughter is a child in need of care, protection and love. Although her daughter may eventually grow into an adult and become a completely independent person, she will always be remembered as a small baby writhing in her mother’s arms. Her mother could only possibly remember her daughter as her baby, even if this baby were to grow capable enough to rule the world. Such is the nature of our connection with our people.
We are condemned always to be slightly misunderstood and misremembered as different versions of who we are. Only we ourselves have even the slightest chance of knowing ourselves entirely. Even then, frightening, inconceivable pieces of our identities remain that we do not understand or even begin to recognise. We might spend the rest of our lives trying to unravel or hide these pieces, or we can come to terms with them and learn to love ourselves wholly.
We spend a rather large amount of our time trying to explain our identities to others, if not in words, then in actions. We choose mannerisms and clothes that help us express ourselves. We put extraordinary effort into curating the images other people have of us, so much so that we begin to forget who we are.
Our images are not our identities. An important part of growing up is learning to accept the fact that not everyone who knows us will understand us. We must learn to become comfortable with being misunderstood. This does not mean we should be oppositional to the point of misanthropy, but rather that we must learn to be comfortable with who we are and our individual journeys, even if it means others see us in an incomplete or seemingly incorrect way. We must love ourselves unapologetically, simply because we are the only ones truly capable of doing so.
