The Mirror and the Gift

Some of the things we're best at are difficult to see from the inside.

That makes sense when you think about it.

If something has always come naturally to you, you don't have much experience of not being able to do it. You know the effort involved, the mistakes, the places where it causes trouble and all the ways you're still not as good as you'd like to be.

Someone watching from the outside sees something different.

They see what happened.

This can produce some strange conversations.

Someone tells you that you're unusually good at explaining complicated things, and you think, I was just explaining it.

Someone admires how easily you talk with strangers. You remember every awkward moment in the conversation.

Someone hears you play music and can't imagine being able to do that. Meanwhile, you're thinking about the note you missed.

Neither view is necessarily wrong.

They're observations made from different places.

The outside observer can see effects that aren't available from inside the process. The person doing the thing has access to the effort, uncertainty and failures that the observer can't see.

Put those views together and sometimes a capability becomes easier to recognize.

I've become suspicious of the word gift when it implies something a person simply possesses.

A capacity can be useful in one setting and miserable in another.

Someone who notices subtle changes in other people's moods may be extraordinarily good at reading a room. The same sensitivity can make a crowded or emotionally tense environment exhausting.

Someone who keeps finding patterns may solve problems other people don't notice. They may also have considerable difficulty leaving a problem alone after everyone else has gone to bed.

Persistence can look like discipline until the thing should have been abandoned.

Sensitivity can provide information until there's too much information to process.

Confidence can help someone act under uncertainty and later prevent them from noticing that they're wrong.

The capacity didn't necessarily change.

The relationship between the capacity and its surroundings did.

This is one reason other people matter when we're trying to understand ourselves.

Introspection gives us information nobody else has. It also comes with a fairly obvious limitation: we're inside the thing we're trying to observe.

Another person gets a different angle.

Occasionally someone notices something specific enough that it changes your own model.

Not, "You're amazing."

That's pleasant, perhaps, but it doesn't contain much information.

Something more like:

"You do this thing when everyone gets confused. You ask one question, everybody stops arguing about the details, and suddenly we're talking about the actual problem."

Now there's something to inspect.

Maybe they're right.

Maybe they aren't.

You can start watching for it.

Does it happen again? Does it work with different people? Does it fail under certain conditions? Is it something you can deliberately use, or does trying to use it deliberately somehow make you worse at it?

Recognition doesn't have to become identity.

It can become another observation.

This works in the other direction too.

People sometimes see our limitations before we do.

The friend who says, "You know you do this every time somebody criticizes your work, right?" may be providing exactly the same kind of outside information as the person who noticed something we do unusually well.

We tend to enjoy one of those mirrors more than the other.

Both can be useful.

Over enough time, certain people become especially good at seeing us because they have more observations.

They've seen us succeed and fail. They've watched the same capacity work beautifully in one situation and cause trouble in another. They know what we were like five years ago, which gives them access to changes we experienced too gradually to notice.

That doesn't make their interpretation authoritative.

Someone can know us for decades and still misunderstand us.

It gives them evidence.

Sometimes we don't realize how much information a particular relationship was providing until the relationship is gone.

A friend moves away. Someone dies. A marriage ends. A colleague retires.

What disappears isn't only the person.

We also lose one of the places from which we were being observed.

That person knew a version of us other people didn't. They may have noticed recurring patterns nobody else had enough time or proximity to see.

Sometimes they saw something useful before we did.

Sometimes they saw something we would rather not have seen at all.

That may be part of what witness actually means.

Not somebody who tells us who we are.

Somebody who has been present long enough to notice.

There is a responsibility in doing that for another person.

If I notice something in you, my observation doesn't become your identity merely because I said it confidently. I may be seeing you under unusual conditions. I may be projecting something of myself onto you. I may simply be wrong.

So perhaps the useful form of recognition is smaller.

"I've noticed this."

Then the other person gets to do something with it.

Or not.

That preserves an important distinction between being seen and being defined.

The best relationships I've known seem to accumulate this kind of information naturally. People learn one another slowly. They notice what happens under pressure, what changes, what persists and which qualities seem to become more or less useful as the environment changes.

Eventually another person may know something about you that you genuinely don't.

And you may know something about them that they genuinely don't.

Neither of you possesses the other person's whole shape.

You just have a view they can't have from where they're standing.

Sometimes that's enough.

Someone says, "You know you're good at that, right?"

And for the first time, you consider the possibility that the thing you've spent your life experiencing as ordinary, annoying or simply unavoidable might look very different from somewhere else.