monkey nonsense

i claim one of my pet peeves is when people act as if they know me, but really they don’t know me at all. i think i’m a very private person, that not many people know me very well. claiming this as a pet peeve furthers perpetuates that idea. i’ll admit, i do use it as an excuse a lot of times to avoid/justify not getting to know people better. and it’s also why i don’t claim to have many close friends. because i’m almost afraid to say that i know someone well… because what if i don’t??

the whole idea of people not knowing the “real” me is based a lot on differences in perception. i would guess 9 out of the 10 people who “know” me perceive me to be: a weird, crazed, monkey obsessed, blue tongued, candy popping, hyperactive, immature slacker who’s shallow and simpleminded (or something like panera’s you pick two… i’m sure you would’ve used at least two of those adjectives to describe me if you suddenly had to describe me for some strange reason). i used to get annoyed when people thought those things of me because i thought of myself differently. i didn’t understand why anyone would even think of me that way. what about my other characteristics?? like uh… er… yeah.

i realize now that when i get nervous (which is quite often… i’m actually pretty shy though those who know me from back then might actually have mistaken me for being outgoing), i tend to become a goofball. call it the chandler bing(!) defense mechanism if you will… whenever i get into an uncomfortable social situation, i’ll start to joke around and inevitably, i’m suddenly known as the blue tongued one, monkey girl, hyperactive/ADD person, etc etc. it’s weird to think how all your actions, however you perceive them, can be perceived differently (not necessarily misperceived because i guess there is no wrong perception). so i understand how people get, in my opinion, the wrong impression and as much as i think they’re wrong, i also realize that their conclusions must have been drawn from somewhere. something i did at some point in time must have been “ambiguous” (not sure that’s the correct word really) enough to allow that.

but humans all think/perceive things differently. every little detail in life (even things like colors… everyone sees colors a little differently) would be open to interpretation with nobody in complete agreement. yet somehow, we are able to generally come up with what constitutes red, yellow, any other color. i think we’re able to come to an agreement because what our eyes perceive falls into what our language has defined as red (or yellow or any other color). when we see only a limited palette of colors (like if an artist only uses certain colors), our eyes actually compensate by seeing gray or white or whatever as the missing color though it’s not really that color. i think perhaps the way we perceive people’s behavior is the same. with only limited exposure, we tend to fill in the blanks and start to generalize as to what their typical personality may be like. following that argument then, if a person really got to know me, they’d really know me.

i guess i comforted myself by telling myself that at least those close to me knew the “real” me. but more and more it seems, the difference in how i perceive myself versus how others perceive me is growing. found out recently how some close friends perceived me. wow, completely different than what i thought of myself. and it kind of made me sad.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006 at 2:37 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.