Alice – You don’t know me
Mum – Of course I do
Alice – Mum, you think you know me. I don’t know me
Today I'm Alice ~ Alice Jamieson
I'm not sure that we ever really get to know people. We know about them, and sometimes we get to know parts of them, but I don't think we ever fully know a person. There's a distinction to be made between knowing a person and knowing about a person. You can know all about a person without knowing them in the slightest.
Knowing about a person is easy. That's what profile pages and cover letters are for. That's why applications and questionnaires and reviews exist. But to begin to actually know a person takes time, a lifetime. People are complicated. We can be acquainted with them for years and even interact with them frequently throughout that time, yet they'll still surprise us.
And that's a good thing. Even for people who don't like surprises, no one likes to be bored—not for too long at least. If we know someone too well, there's nothing left to talk about, nothing left to do. Why ask someone a question if you already know their answer? What is there to say if you already know what they think and how they'll respond? You don't want to know someone that well.
And then there are parts others don't want us to see. There are parts of us we don't want others to see. Those parts of us we hide from ourselves, those parts we don't want to face ourselves, we definitely don't want others to see those bits. And perhaps it's best that way. Not everyone needs to know everything about a person.
It is hard to analyse our reasons for doing the things we do, and we do those things for a whole variety of reasons
It's really not about how long you know a person because people can change over time. Whether we really change fundamentally or whether different parts of us emerge at varying levels, I don't know, but we do change over time. We change our minds. Our tastes change.
And the world around us changes. Sometimes that's the thing that changes us: other people, places, events. Even if the world does only rotate, rather than truly evolve, it changes for us. It doesn't stand still.
We change; the world changes; it's a complicated interplay of several moving pieces with several more pieces moving inside each of them. We surprise and confuse ourselves. That's why we go on journeys of self-discovery, whether they're external travels or internal meditations.
We become increasingly self-aware and learn more and more about ourselves when we start looking. There are things we hide from ourselves: memories, emotions, ideas, desires. Sometimes they're things we've made ourselves forget, and sometimes they're depths we've just never explored. We don't understand why we do things because we don't understand ourselves
We look at other people and imagine we know them. We don’t know them. We can’t know them. Everyone is a mystery. I was a mystery to myself