Self-representations and how to reconcile them with the truth

Hear your voice on tape, or watch your face on screen, and it’s alien. Unnerving. Disturbing.

The few, unfortunate times in my life I’ve had to sit back and listen to the sound of my own awkward voicemail message, I have felt the same ear-trembling pain that comes with nails on a chalkboard. But it’s not that there’s any particular aspect of my voice that I wish were different. There’s no particular tone or inflection that stands out as hateful. Rather, it’s a nonspecific hatred. An irrational sort of aversion. I hear my voice, and all goes to hell. I feel my body quite literally being siphoned through the polluted New York sewers, my skin being overrun by colonies of red ants, my intestines shredded like Parmesan cheese. Hearing my voice is my melodramatic nightmare. But I can’t be alone in this fear.

Self-representations never quite turn out how we anticipate — no one will claim that their photographed face looks exactly how they’d expect it to or that their voice on video sounds the same as their voice from their own perspective. But really, we’re right — they’re not the same. No representation is right, no recording completely true to life. Minor tragedy here, but it’s time we all face the facts: Cameras are wrong. Microphones are wrong. We don’t actually, completely, look the way we do in the mirror. No matter how careful and precise, machines will always distort reality, and change the people we actually are into minorly altered versions of ourselves.

I’ve been thinking recently about this quintessential truth: I’ll never really see myself as I am. The public takes in a picture of me that I can’t even grasp. This is unsettling and bizarre but also fascinating. Who is the Lily people see? I find myself asking, philosophizing my days away like the Writing Seminars nerd I really am. Does everybody see the same me? Am I different? Am I strange? And then, getting a little full of myself with it, I question: If my life was a movie starring Lily Kairis, who would I be?

Yeah — okay. But don’t go fooling yourself — you’ve probably asked yourself this before, too. You’ve wondered what actor or actress would play you, and what the public would think, and what genre the film would be, and how it would do at the box office, and, hey, what exactly is it rated on Rotten Tomatoes (or maybe that’s just me)?

It’s fun to imagine a world that revolves around yourself. Self-centrism is strangely, truly, consistently rewarding. So, yes, sometimes I sit in Gilman in between attempts to write a film analysis of Psycho and wonder how other people see me and what kind of role I play in their lives. I’ve been here at Hopkins for less than a year and I already feel so engrossed in this world, such a quintessential part of it, and often I catch myself believing that the best friends I have now are lifelong. But — are they really? Are they the soul-deep people in the story of my life that I believe they are? And, even freakier, do I matter at all in the story of theirs? In Gilman, in between badly worded paragraphs and messy thesis statements, I wonder how Lily Kairis, the character, would appear in the broader movie of my friends’ lives.

I’d hope she’d at least be the comic relief. The gluten-free weirdo bringing back dishes of gloriously layered salad to her table at the FFC after minutes and minutes of plating and preparation. She’d be the one who accidentally said “sh*t” in front of her friend’s parents when they took them all out to dinner. She’d be the one who tried to give her leftover chicken to a homeless guy on the culture walk before Pre-O. Ah, yes, Lillian Riegel Kairis, the quirky one. The special snowflake. The comic relief.

This is the conclusion I’ve come to, time and time again, when I mentally walk myself through the possibilities of my own face appearing in the metaphorical screens of other people’s minds. I may be odd, I may be sassy, I may even be essentially irrelevant (rather not think too hard about that one, though), but at least, in all likelihood, based on objective evidence, there’s a good chance I’m the comic relief spouting off nonsense and having no shame on the sidelines. And I suppose that’s something to be proud of.

I do pride myself on my humor, on adding a level of lightheartedness to a situation when people are taking things far too seriously for the context. I pride myself on looking stupid for the sake of a good laugh because it’s a maker of friendship, because it’s a stress relief and because — according to the Internet — it burns calories. So like, why not? All things considered, I’m content with the role I play in this world, and the energy I expend into it every day.

It’s terrifying to think about how other people see you, terrifying to imagine it’s anything different from what you see. But this terror is futile. You don’t control what other people think and how they feel, and you’ll never be able to. Their world is theirs and yours is yours. The only thing you can control is your own world, and the person you are in it, and for me (gladly) that is the proud comic relief.