I like when I catch glimpses of myself mirrored back on video or picture liking how I look in that moment. We can never control how another person perceives us, so I like to think we exist in their perception as an amalgamation of glimpses: our hair after a few forward folds and standing postures, disheveled like a child’s, innocent like we’re not experienced enough to know or care about what the hair should feel like on our head or how it should fall over our face and shoulders. Or whether it falls within the boundaries of what it’s supposed to look like. Wild like that, trusting in our own nature that what we have and how our hair falls is enough; it’s enough that we exist because We Are.
As far as I know, nobody who perceives me in physical reality has a digital album on their phone housing a collection of glimpses of me at my “wild and free” or strained and sad or kind and thoughtful or sparkling or good-exhausted. A collection of glimpses is impossible to store anywhere, in cyber or physical space, unless you’re receiving letters from me, then there’s likely a box of some sort to house them. Because a glimpse isn’t just a vectored look. And it’s not just a how-i-appear-in-that-moment look either. There’s always more dimensions and in cyber space we pick the looks that we keep in our boxes which we keep either private or open to all. Or we belabor twenty different pictures before settling on one to send through the air. We do our very best to be in control of an outsider’s perspective of us and it might be enough sometimes. But for me and how I want to live I can’t make that trade anymore, I can’t project onto a collection of photos, likes, comments and views anything meaningful without glimpses that can’t be captured.
I argue with my therapist about this; she said I was approaching relationships from an intellectual standpoint but what I was saying is that there’s not enough data for what it feels like to be in a person’s presence so I can’t say anything about how I feel in my body when I think about them because it’s all lies and story and I don’t want to be attached to stories because I get lost in them and I’m often wrong.
Ok yes she was only asking me to just be aware of how my body feels when I think about a person independent and free of any story I might tell myself about what these feelings mean, but you can see why I don’t want to do that, how it’s too risky because storytelling is part of my nature?
I think what I’m getting at is I’m realizing more and more that the things that really exist can’t be recorded; they can only be experienced. You could see a thousand pictures of me or read all the words on my hard drive and you’d still have no idea what it feels like to be near me. I’d only be a ghost in your mind.