How well can you ever really know someone?
Is it possible to fathom the weight of what it is they hide, the depth of the pits in their souls, or the darkness that stains it? Do we merely hope that our understanding suffices, that we know them enough, or that if the truth is laid bare, we will be able to reconcile with it, to embrace it?
How absurd to think that we don’t really know ourselves either, and this coalesces with the highly probable, if not undeniable, truth that no one ever really knows you.
If we are to confront the truth and accept it, does this discovery discolor everything we knew before, or does it cast a shadow over our memories? Can we separate our feelings from this revelation? Does it paint a new picture, one of a stranger we had perhaps fallen in love with, one who had never left our side, maybe one who raised us?
How wrecking does the truth have to be for us to feel betrayed, as if we've been lied to?
We think we want the truth for our minds, but our hearts can never really accept it. Our veins are filled with blood born of secrecy, and each one of us fears something about themselves. The universal thought that we can never really get to reveal our souls and the darkness inked inside. Even in our righteousness, even after absolution, we can never truly look in the mirror and see the truth.
Life, as a whole, is one perfectly curated fallacy. You never consider yourself capable of murder until you are holding the gun. You never think of yourself as a sinner until you are at the mercy of the gods. In essence, it seems that you don’t really know who you are. The reflection in the mirror is but a stranger, observing as the soul is tainted. To know the limits of oneself is profound wisdom, and even these limits you can never discern unless you are at the edge, unless you have no choice. It is then that you realize just how little we know of ourselves, how we undo the things we did, how we unsay the things we said. We act out of need, out of humanness, out of feeling. We act in ways unfamiliar even to ourselves.
The correlation between our humanness and emotions is an intertwined line that stretches to eternity. To feel is to be human; to be human is to be vulnerable. But once we feel too much, once we can no longer hide our savageness and act with our hearts rather than our minds, our actions become reprehensible, like the predatory acts of an untamed animal. It boggles the mind, troubles the soul, that it’s but a thin line that separates the two. It is a single vacuous act that can ruin everything, altering the course of your life all at once, changing how others perceive you and how you perceive yourself.
But how can you ever really know someone if you don’t know yourself? As it seems that life is more about trying to understand yourself than trying to fathom the idea of others - their existence, their being. Yet, out of necessity we still meet strangers and model them into the most significant parts of our lives, as it is fundamental to hope. To live not in doubt but with hope that stirs the imagination, to perceive people as per how good of a character they can play, not on their capacity for transgression.
The whole idea of being perceived remains scary to most. To be seen is to be known, and we hide because from what we don’t understand about self, we fear judgement from the eyes of those we think can see the truth. Simply, we are scared of ourselves.
It takes less than a moment for your reality to shift, for you to be capable of what you think yourself incapable of. In this way, we think that we are able to do so wrong and we forget that this might also mean, inversely, that we are more than able to do good beyond what we know. We hold back from opening our hearts, more as not to reveal the things we don’t know about ourselves than the things we do know.
I would say that none of us truly knows anyone. Matter-of-factly, we only hope, and that isn’t the worst thing.
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