Strange that I can tell which one of my parents is coming up the stairs just by the pattern of footfalls, but they still remain so unknown to me in other ways.
This weekend we three were sitting around my smallish white Ikea table after breakfast. I'd made them some fake Larabars, which I brought out on a tray. My father complained that they were yellow and only tasted one at my insistence. "What flavor is this?" he demanded before taking a bite.
"Try to guess," I replied. "It's something familiar." I thought he liked carrot cake, but I didn't have any specific memory to validate this.
"You're telling me I am familiar with whatever makes these yellow?"
"First of all, they're orange, and second of all, yes."
"He won't be able to guess without more clues," put in my mother.
"Why not?" I asked.
"It's not in his personality."
I had no idea how to connect those dots, but trusted to the accumulated wisdom of their marriage and offered the giveaway clue as he took his second bite. After identifying the flavor, he casually said he didn't like quizzes about food. Clearly, my mom had known that. I didn't know how she knew, or how I didn't know it, since I love to orchestrate moments of discovery and must have asked him to guess other foods before.
I'm not sure how to delineate the different realms of knowing another person, with their unclear borders, but I'm sure that one of them can only be reached in the presence of love. Love as a willingness to put yourself aside and see the other person as they are, not as what you are. I have been arrested in my ability to know a specific family member by a lack of love for them. They're older than me and I think they should know how to treat people better. While the "should" thoughts are present, I'm distracted and miss out on clearly seeing what's already there.
There's physical, everyday knowing of coworkers, teammates, family members, whether you feel you love them or not. It's why I could match the backs of the legs of my cross-country teammates with their faces and somehow knew what everyone's feet looked like on my soccer teams. It allows us to distinguish the voice of each person we know, even when we know so many people.
It takes wisdom to balance a person's self-revelation with your observations. It isn't always true that no one knows you better than you know yourself. Perhaps on balance that is the case, but humans have an incredible capacity for denial (I know this intimately from both sides) or ignorance and have a funhouse-warped view of themselves unless others weigh in honestly. Someone wisely observed that there are things a stranger spots about you in 30 seconds that you could go your whole life not realizing about yourself.
So self-revelation is not the whole picture, but there is a pocket of emotional and inner truth that can only be accessed and shared with the world by its possessor. This means our ability to know another is in some way limited by that person's level of self-awareness. I have known multiple people who could not be connected with on a deeper emotional level than they accessed "on their own time." These were shallow relationships despite plenty of the other forms of knowing. No matter what strategies you employ, no matter how vulnerable you make yourself, connecting (by definition, mutual) can only be as deep as the shallowest or most inhibited person involved.
Lastly, Real People. This is a difficult concept to articulate. Over the years, some friends have reacted to my lengthy explanation with recognition, though they hadn't had words for it. One such friend lived in the same small community as I. We stayed up late one night listing and discussing people and found we had almost complete overlap (though she was more charitable than I) as to who the Real People around us were. I concluded that Real People was a real thing.
What are Real People? I offer these general guidelines:
1. Real People are able to understand how others might feel, and incorporate this into their speech and action. Usually a person who will speak at length about themself without posing any questions to you is not a Real Person.
2. They don't hold you at arm's length. They don't necessarily divulge every detail of their lives, or even much at all in terms of personal plans or information, but they are willing to admit to being happy or sad or hungry and they let you be things too, without automatically trying to talk you out of it.
3. Real People seem more alive and present than other people. They don't automatically try to edit their emotions out of a situation; they understand that emotions are the situation. Would "emotionally intelligent" be interchangeable with "Real"? I think not. A therapist, during a session with a client, would not be a Real Person except in flickers. Counseling is too arm's-length and one-sided, even if the counselor is healthy and emotionally intelligent. Also, I've known and heard of people who could identify emotion in others but not experience it themselves, and that is not how Real People act.
4. The shortest definition I can give is that Real People get it. Understanding this definition is a litmus test of sorts. If despite hearing the descriptions listed above, a lengthy definition of "it" is needed, that can indicate the person might not get it. Perhaps a trait of Real People is comprehending the concept of Real People. This is the least sure guideline on the list, because language use differs from person to person. I've known some Real People from other countries with varying levels of English ability. However, a person's way of using language often reveals if they're a Real Person or not. I can't articulate how--this is one of those aspects that's hardest to explain, so it didn't get its own bullet point. Anyway, if someone's grasp of English is weaker, it can take longer to discover that they're Real, since they may talk like they're not.
A world without Real People would be suffocating and depressing on the level of--and I don't say this lightly--inducing suicidal thoughts. In my childhood, Real People were rare, Real adults almost nonexistent from my vantage, but I was lucky to find some in the form of peers, and they gave me hope that I wasn't alone in the world. I've since become more lenient. I haven't thought about Real People in a while; I no longer divide the world so starkly. I acknowledge the meanness inherent in this term, and of course all people deserve always to be treated as people. Yet not everyone is able or willing to engage authentically with the world and with others. And those who hold back their authentic engagement, I think, can't be truly known.
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