lol what if we like "perceived" each other ... haha jk ... unless??
Dear friend—
I am thinking a lot about my internet presence these days. A few weeks ago, an essay by R. E. Hawley1 brought me back to a meme that I personally laud among the greats: “If we want the rewards of being loved, we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.” It’s a beautiful, precocious, and infinitely memeable phrase that, as the best memes do, alludes to an essential part of the human condition. Vulnerability is the road we walk toward both profound connection and profound ridicule.
Hawley then takes a leap that I hadn’t before, connecting the quote with a genre of meme that despairs about being “perceived.” A bleary 8 am tweet: “It is much too early to be perceived.” Truly, no one should perceive me before I’ve had coffee and put on my eyebrows, for my sake and for theirs.
Part of the humor of the meme is using the verb “perceiving,” a kind of gaudy and erudite word, for the mere act of “seeing.” But it also suggests something more intense. Not just being seen or viewed or beholden, but perhaps something like understood.
To perceive someone is to reach out and try to (figuratively) wrap them in your arms. To trace their contours and imbue them with meaning. To gesture toward submitting them to the mortifying ideal of being known.
Along those lines, perceiving and being perceived are intimate—perhaps too intimate for the likes of Twitter followers or coworkers.
The plea of “don’t perceive me” memes imply that the default setting in our everyday lives is being perceived, all the time. I think in some ways this is true, and in others, not.
As I’ve heard many times before: No one cares as much about what I do, or what I look like, than I do. I can stand from on high and know that it’s true. But down below, my lizard brain has yet to catch up. Even if no one is perceiving me at all, it feels as though they are, and that is just as terrifying. And, if anyone is perceiving, I want a role in that perception. I want them to perceive me on my terms.
And so here’s a confession: I care too much about what other people think of me. Guilt, fear, approval, and praise are very core to how I move in the world, for good and for ill. It’s makes me kind, considerate, polite … capricious, vain, thin-skinned. (It is a work in progress.)
As part of that, or perhaps because of it, I am in the camp of people who believe that the core of ourselves is tied to how we interact with others. For me, there is no self, no identity, without relationships. We don’t exist in a vacuum.
Yet Hawley writes in their essay, “I feel least constrained, most like myself, when I am unseen,” and I felt that, too (though perhaps not in the positive way that Hawley implies). When I am alone, when I am unseen, my vices spill out from my pores like play-doh from a spaghetti strainer. I do the things that I wish I didn’t, like pick at my calluses and online shop. I stop taking care of the dishes and consume content from cancelled celebrities. I’m not good at self-regulating. As I’ve written before, I am a better person when in the company of others.2
Despite the discomfort, I think being perceived is net good for me. It keeps me honest and humble and empathetic. It reminds me that I am not alone in the world and I better act like it. But there’s a flip side to that, of course.
In “Screen Protectiveness,” Suzannah Showler reflects on the violation we feel when anyone besides ourselves has possession of our devices.3 They recount their experience taking their dying smart phone to a mall kiosk, only to have the teenager at the counter comment on the number of tabs they leave open, while they quickly try to explain away their recent browser history.
The internet, Showler says, magnifies the gravity of our littlest thoughts by fossilizing them like bugs in amber. This invites us to reflect not only on our intentional relationships and actions, but on the minutiae that is recorded through our everyday use of technology. Our search history. Our saved articles. Our shopping carts.
“The kind of digital particulates and residues that turn up in our devices aren’t the things we might normally stake our identities on, but the fact of their being recorded imbues them with new meaning.”
Because of its convenience and (illusion of) privacy, the internet becomes a repository and enabler for our id. We feel emboldened to express desires (the shopping cart) and ask questions (the search history) that we might not otherwise.
This then reminds me of the idea that our identities are not based in our thoughts, but rather our actions; not our most immediate impulses, but the way we respond to them and how they may or may not materially change the world around us. (I am not sure if this is something I truly believe or if it is just a desperate plea to not be defined by my internet search history.)
Showler then wonders, “Why keep all these things if they make me feel so vulnerable to misunderstanding?”, so perfectly encapsulating one of my worst fears—being misunderstood. Few other things give me a more visceral, knee-jerk reaction; few things spike my blood more than someone believing something of me that I know is untrue.
Yet, I fling myself into the internet every day tweeting and commenting, writing these silly little missives … and for what? For the fleeting dopamine of a retweet or a comment?
Showler’s essay came to me at a time when I began paring back my own internet presence. Perhaps I don’t need my full name and likeness attached to every scrap of myself on the web. Perhaps I can change some accounts to “private,” too. Perhaps I can corral the id of posting random thoughts on the internet by giving them a little distance from my public face. They are mine, I claim them, but only to those who are close enough to me to recognize them as mine. This is me negotiating the terms of my own perception, and I think it is doing wonders for my sanity and my sense of self.
On another tack, I loved—and am still thinking about—Showler’s essay because it perfectly expresses the ridiculous and very real anxiety of sharing your screen with someone (They compare it to the abstract sharing we do every day with the surveillance giants that exploit us for data. Please read this essay, it is excellent). In other words, it makes me feel seen, deeply and richly—perceived!
Maybe that’s the fate I aim for with my own little shouts into the ether. Maybe that’s one of the greatest things a writer can accomplish in today’s world of infinite content and tightening echo chambers.
In laying bare our own ideas and experiences, we don’t just fling shit into the ether—we reach out and brush fingers with someone who thought they were alone. Or who never had words for this specific, communal feeling before. Or who will reply with exactly what we needed to hear.
Perhaps there are two ways to perceive someone. One is more surface. We perceive someone by both bearing witness and making meaning. This has nothing to do with the desires or feelings of the perceived, which is why it feels so scary. Someone is making meaning from us and we don’t get to engage with that meaning. Such is the judgment after a quick conversation with a coworker; the fleeting reaction to a tweet.
And then there is perceiving at that deeper level, where a person may cradle our thoughts in their hands and create a relationship in which we have a growing say in their perception of us. We have the time and space to fill in the nooks and crannies of our story, our processes, our ideas. That is an intense kind of vulnerability—one that we probably can’t achieve in the span of 140 characters, but perhaps we can achieve in a little missive like this one.
Such work plunges us further down the road to the mortifying ordeal of being known—but of course, down the road to the rewards of being loved, too.
mia xx
Change log: Aug 5, 2022 caught some mistypes and errors, and added a lil qualification on Hawley’s quote about feeling more themself when unseen.
https://reallifemag.com/im-not-there/
https://reallifemag.com/new-feelings-screen-protectiveness/