Every individual’s story

Every person has a story.

But first, you need to understand a person in general. One person is really like three people:

A) the person he thinks he is

B) the person other people see

C) the person he really is

The three of them, one at a time

Our first personality is who we think we are. We may think of ourselves as strong, courageous, honest, helpful - and in reality we may not fully possess those traits. Not because we are lying. Because we are describing our intentions, and everybody grades themselves on intention.

Our second personality is how others see us. As they say, the first impression is the last impression. Someone may hold a completely different idea of us simply because we could not express ourselves well at the beginning. They met us on a bad day, or a nervous one, and quietly filed that version away as permanent.

The third and last is who we really are. Here two situations arise. In the first, we know some of these qualities about ourselves. In the second, many of them are still hidden from us, because we have not yet been in the situation that would reveal them.

That last part is worth sitting with. There are things about you that you genuinely do not know yet. How you behave in a crisis you have not had. What you would sacrifice for something you have not encountered. You are not withholding this information. You simply have not been shown it.

Which is a good argument for humility about yourself, not just about other people.

Why people get misjudged

Because of these three personalities, a person is misjudged again and again. He is not given a chance to explain his actions.

Remember: just as every coin has two sides and each side tells a different story, each person has a story with different perspectives.

Don’t make assumptions about anyone. Talk it out and try to find the truth.

Every story has three sides too:

A) Your side of the story.

B) The other person’s side of the story.

C) The true side of the story.

The uncomfortable part

Here is what makes this genuinely difficult rather than just a nice idea.

We do not experience our own side as a side. We experience it as what happened. The other person’s version arrives sounding like spin, and ours arrives sounding like a factual report - and it feels that way to them too, in exact mirror image.

That is not dishonesty on anyone’s part. Memory reconstructs. It keeps what fits the story and quietly drops what does not, and it does this without telling you.

So the practical version of all this is not “be fair-minded,” which everybody already believes they are. It is more specific: assume your account is missing something, and go and ask what.

Try to figure out all the sides before you reach a conclusion. Let go of the past and take this step forward, giving people a chance to explain.

It is never too late, after all.

Give people the later version

One more thing, and it is the one I try hardest to remember.

People change, and our idea of them usually doesn’t. We meet someone, form a picture in the first few weeks, and then keep relating to that picture for years while the actual person quietly becomes someone else. They grow out of the thing we still hold against them, and we never notice, because we stopped looking.

That happens to us too. Somewhere there is a person carrying a version of you from five years ago and treating it as current.

So it is worth asking occasionally, about anyone you have known a long time: am I responding to who they are, or to who they were when I decided?

-Kashish