This Isn't Me

“This Isn’t Me”
or
‘On the Non-Objectivity of People’

“This isn’t me!” I want to scream out to the dining hall table, as I sit there, silently.

I am a social person. This is what I know, or what I tell myself. It is what I consider myself to be. But ask anyone who’s met me since I lost a chunk of my hearing, and they’ll tell you quite a different tale.

As I sit at the dining hall table, it’s not that I don’t want to chat away with the people, or that I’d rather be sulking in a corner by myself. Rather, I plain and simply cannot understand the words that are being spoken. This skill is, to say the least, a pre-requisite for participation in a conversation.

It has now been a week and a half of this. I have had some conversations, with individuals, when we happen to be in a quiet environment. But it goes even further.

I was thinking to myself this morning that, despite my lack of communication, I don’t really want to be friends with most of these people anyway. Not many people have struck me as the types I’d really want to pursue a friendship with. Except for the people I’ve had conversations with. Most of these people struck me as people I could enjoy being friends with.

And then it struck me:

There is no such thing as “types of people.” I have not been social to most people, so why should I expect them to come across as friendly to me. It is not that they are “unfriendly types,” but rather that in relation to me, this is how they act.

I suppose I could make some sort of analogy to the Uncertainty Principle here, in terms of the fact that the observer necessarily affects that which is being observed. In other words, I have no idea what kind of people most of the other kids are. They come across a certain way to me, but there is no way to know if this is how they normally are, or if they are this way because this is how they treat the asocial version of me.

But on the other hand, they aren’t getting to know me. “This isn’t me!” I want to say. But then again, if it’s not me, then who is it?