Us

I was talking to a guy whom i knew from one of my tutorial class this evening. I knew him through a class presentation which we did together with two other classmates. As i speak to him more often whenever we meet in school, i am increasingly inclined to think that he's an interesting friend to talk with. For one thing, in our conversations, he does 80% of the talking while i do the remaining 20% (don't ask how i derived that figure). This leaves me listening to him talk most of the time, which is not a bad thing since he's not at all boring or talking about himself endlessly. After all we take the same major and therefore it isn't at all very difficult to find something common to talk about.

The other thing about him, which i found out today, is that he jumps from one topic to another faster than you can figure out what he just said. So half the time while i listen to what he is talking about, my mind has to adjust pretty quickly to the imminent change in subject. He told me that every now and then 'we' see someone we know and there's something that we want very much to say to the person, something that is in our mind and that we just need someone to talk with. (He's thinking of himself, i am sure.) Then, almost as if to inform me how i should respond to him, he adds that while he says different and many things to people he knows, he says them incompletely (or selectively) such that they won't be able to grasp just what kind of person he is. In other words, his loquacity does not betray his real identity. And hence, therefore, his predisposition to talk about many things but only partially. I was amused enough to tell him that he's a very interesting person. Being not a very good conversationist myself, i was happy to let him do most of the talking.

Before i left, though, i bade him farewell and told him that i shall find out the real him by weaving together all the disparate information/ideas/stories that he had talked about. He smiled at me, somewhat a little surprised at my suggestion. He probably knew there isn't much of a real him behind his public persona.

Which brings me to this point: our self-identity derives from how others perceive us as much as from our own consciousness. No matter how much a veneer we hide behind, there's an inevitability to others' perception of us which we have no control over - because we don't always conciously portray an image that we want others to imbibe; we simply can't. There's always a part of us that is decided by others which we have no control over. On the other hand, we do knowingly deliberate to affect others' opinions of us. For aside from decorum and propriety (which restricts our behaviour), we do exercise control over what selective information we tell people. We may know a lot about our good friends but there're also things that we do not know. Even so, it is when we are with our close friends and loved ones - people whom we are totally at ease speaking to or hanging around with - that there are fewer inhibitions restraining our thoughts and actions. And we are at such moments a lot closer to being ourselves, safe, assured and contented.