For the longest time, I believed other people held the missing pieces of me.
So I searched their faces.
Their pauses.
Their smiles.
The spaces between their words.
Certain that somewhere inside the way they looked at me was the truth of who I was.
But there is something peculiar about trying to see yourself through another person's eyes.
The one asking, "What do they think of me?" cannot help but answer with its own voice.
I thought I was listening to them.
I was listening to myself.
How could I possibly know what existed inside a mind I had never entered?
I couldn’t, could I?
So my mind did what minds have always done.
It filled the silence.
It borrowed memories, fears, old wounds, quiet hopes, forgotten embarrassments, and stitched them together into a version of another person's thoughts.
Then, with remarkable confidence, it called that version their perspective.
How strange.
To spend years fearing a stranger who had never spoken.
To mistake my own narrator for someone else's voice.
Perhaps this is how perspectives are born.
Not as lies.
But as stories so convincing they forget they are stories.
A dream never tells you that you're dreaming.
A perspective never tells you that you're looking through it.
It simply whispers,
"This is reality."
Only when another perspective appears does the first become visible.
Not because it changed.
Because you finally noticed the lens.
Then I began to wonder...
What if every judgment I imagine someone holding about me first had to exist as a possibility within myself?
Not because it is true.
But because my mind has only one instrument with which to imagine another mind…
its own.
I have never truly seen the world through your eyes.
Only through my best approximation of them.
An approximation built from my own software.
My own language.
My own fears.
My own longing to be understood.
This does not mean people never misunderstand me.
They will.
It does not mean they never judge me.
They do.
It simply means that the certainty with which I imagine their judgment often belongs more to me than to them.
And there is a quiet freedom in realizing this.
Because if I cannot know what you truly think of me, then I can no longer mistake my imagination for your reality.
Perhaps that space between us was never meant to be closed.
Perhaps it exists to remind us that every human being is an undiscovered country.
Even to themselves.
So maybe the goal was never to become perfectly understood.
Maybe it was simply to notice the moment I stopped confusing my reflection for someone else's eyes.
Because the mirror was never judging me.
It had only learned to speak in my voice.
Wordplay by Cloé Wittenberg
Follow me on Facebook for more of these
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BMR5EfcPb/
