Summary
You can't force someone to question their reality ... only they have the ability to question and alter themselves. Their will. Their desire to change. Not yours or anyone elses.
Elaine @thewebrecluse
August 3 2023 10:33am
I always set myself apart from others because I was way different than my peers not only in how I saw the world around me, but also how I understood how other people saw it. In middle school I went though some … terrifying revelations about reality that nearly landed me in a “facility” before finding my footing and learning to navigate it all.
According to my journals I was 12 when I first started noticing that everyone had their own realities that they lived in and that there was no amount of LOGIC that could ever connect them to one another. I believed that being the best person I could be, across ALL of those realities was the best way to live … the best way to avoid conflicts and other people’s madness; if I was the same person to all people … of course that was naive and ridiculous … because people are … not well.
If 10 people hate you and only 3 people like you … which ones are wrong about you and which ones are right about you? Or all they all right about you and simply just have different levels of bias or transference towards you based on aspects of you that they themselves cannot see clearly? Their reality where you exist is different from other people’s realities where you exist. To someone you are a friend, to someone else you’re the Devil, and still to someone else you’re just simply invisible.
In trying to find the best and most even space between everyone’s individual realities I turned into someone who was striving to be as consistent as possible under all circumstances … very little code switching (except with Black people) and no adjustments to my core self around different people. Just WYSIWYG to the entire world with no variations.
So, if people disliked me then it was consistent and easy to track why.
I was around the same age … maybe 13 or 14 when I realized that, as I stated, in everyone’s reality, you appeared completely different. Even with the same attitude, the same behaviors, the same treatment of others … people saw you through their own LENS … their own biases and madness and twisted perspectives. I found this so beyond fascinating and terrifying in middle school … it really shaped and broke me in some ways but that revelation completely changed my view of myself too.
It also changed my perspective of how I also saw people’s behavior and I began to be able to perceive all the masks and walls that people hid behind and all of the ways they tried to mask the true colors in their hues and manipulate their Psychopasses etc … anything to appear differently from what their actual core was. I came to understand that they believed their own roleplay as well, that it was even necessary for them.
My peers were terrifying … Teenagers are sociopaths on a GOOD day.
Learning to protect my peace and separate myself from toxic people and environments started EARLY, but it took me a long time to truly understand that changing someone else’s reality and perception of you in their reality was IMPOSSIBLE. No amount of consistency, truth, or positive effort can break through a wall someone has put up to protect themselves from the truth of the world or anyone else’s. Trying to reason with people who are disconnected from any semi-global reality is futile.
Watching how different people reacted to the exact same behavior or information presented, seeing how different realities shaped their reactions etc. In my communications class I was always teaching how it’s like that game of telephone … how people take in information through all their different lenses and biases and hangups and traumas … and then spit out their version of whatever it was they took in. It will be different for every single person, and you cannot change that. Ever.
The ONLY way to change someone’s individual reality is for them to change it themselves. You can’t alter, convince, or force someone to see the world differently from how they have learned to shape it for their own protection and understanding. That is their life, their reality, their personal kingdom they have made to survive and make sense of life. You can’t breach those walls … talking, lecturing, pleading, complaining … useless. It’s impenetrable from the outside. Don’t waste your time.
Walls that protect frightened people from using higher order thinking skills or seeing a semi-global truth are not meant to be penetrated from the outside. They can be REINFORCED from the outside by similar energy … but they can’t be DESTROYED by opposite energy from the outside.
When the reinforcement energy stops flowing in … when the person on the other side of that wall realizes they are alone in their reality and perceptions … the wall begins to crumble for many.
You can’t force someone to question their reality … only they have the ability to question and alter themselves. Their will. Their desire to change. Not yours or anyone elses.
Stop arguing with people who hide behind walls that protect them from truth. You’ll succeed in doing nothing but causing them to reinforce behind it.
Stop wasting your energy on futile things.
Life is way too short for that nonsense and your life, as a positive, forward focused person, is too valuable to waste on pointless pursuits.
Others are waiting for your light.
Others who are not behind walls and who need support and reinforcement to survive this mad world.
Help THEM.
How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself and in no instance bypass the discriminations of reason? You have been given the principles that you ought to endorse, and you have endorsed them. What kind of teacher, then, are you still waiting for in order to refer your self-improvement to him? You are no longer a boy, but a full-grown man. If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things off and always deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself, you will not notice that you are making no progress, but you will live and die as someone quite ordinary. From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And you, although you are not yet a Socrates, should live as someone who at least wants to be a Socrates.
