ARE YOU HUMAN? OR AN ETHEREAL BEAUTY?

EXISTENTIAL #6 (SEPTEMBER 1, 2024)

"How well can you ever know someone else?"

I think every person will have a different standard of what is a large amount of knowing someone, which informs when they feel they are close to someone or even just friends. I've been in many situations where people considered me friends before I considered them such or I only call them my friend due to how long we've known each other, but they either don't know me much now or never knew me much at all (like Hannah and Lily at my school for example). I know the question wasn't about friends, but y'know, I feel like this question naturally brings up friendship.

This is actually hard for me to answer, because like... I've thought about this before, but also not really. I don't really know any specific quality that makes me feel I know someone else well. Someone could talk to me about their hobbies, friends, family, etc. and I can still feel distant from them. I consider Toby and Madhu from school not very close friends, since I have to keep secrets about my madness and neurodivergence to stay safe offline. It's often hard to open up to people about these traits without them denying I have them, forcing a mainstream understanding of them onto me, or being scared of them. I feel they do not know me well. I also feel that I know Madhu better than Toby, since we talk more often, but even then I wouldn't say I know Madhu well at all. Just surface level interests, opinions on people at our school, and some home life things. I've always flipped back and forth between considering people close or not actually, especially when I was younger and would go after people who showed even a drop of interest in things I hid, like art or my sexuality. I think it's some sort of object permanence problem.

I think you can only know someone by how much they tell about themselves alongside their actions & how well those two things line up, but even the same action can have different motivations and people will act differently to different people. For talking about themselves, it depends on how well they know themself. People can say they are a people pleaser, but may take years to realize how they became one or who taught them to be. People can only really know others as well as they know themselves often too, like how people will dislike those with similar qualities that they dislike in themselves. I think to an extent, this also goes into how a lot of progressives and people in my generation seem willing to talk about trauma, but only in this very generalized way. People aren't really encouraged to explore specific themes in their trauma, especially if they are an undesirable traumatized person, like Cluster Bs. It makes sense. That's a very sensitive issue and people, like when I was younger, are often dissociated from it or still base their worldview on it. When I was younger, I could identify big aspects of my trauma, like not feeling my thoughts or feelings were wanted compared to others and feeling distant from others, but (like I say in one of the entries) I only realized how much that had to do with an idea of domination/inferiority and hiding behind a mask, which is why my trauma developed specifically into narcissistic traits. Someone could have gone through the same things as me and gotten a different lesson from it, maybe turning into more borderline traits with the emphasis on lack of identity, instability & life feeling unsafe, and latching onto people for safety (and I did have a lot of borderline traits when I was younger before working on them now that I think of it. That was why I suspected BPD before NPD, aside from BPD just being more mainstream; Not de-stigmatized, because a lot of people still consider people with BPD abusive and even mainstream, pro-psychiatry understandings of the neurotype are their own beast). I'm sure smaller aspects of my life influenced why I have my specific traits too though compared to others, even those with the similar feeling I identified when I was younger. I've been wanting to look more into trauma narratives recently as I realized that may be similar to what I'm talking about here? And I did discover these things in my life a lot through my maladaptive daydreaming, thinking of my life as a movie or documentary or interview or something equally theatrical like this. I'm not really sure what the intricacies of a trauma narrative are though or how they're done in therapy.

I'm talking a lot about friends here, but... I guess you could know an enemy well too. It would just be harder, since I'm assuming you two don't like each other, so they would not openly tell you a lot of things due to distrust. Maybe if you two used to be friends or if you get information on them through their friends, family, etc. But they could also be hiding something from them too. You could search their phone or diary or whatever, but again, the problem of how well they know themself.

I notice I tend to feel more consistently close to the people (like Hajar, Sophia, or even Brandie) who I've known for longer, but talk to privately at least weekly or more than that. I know I felt very close to Hiraeth due to Hiraeth often talking to me about more serious topics and we messaged each other daily for a solid 3 months & before then saw each other on the Quotev feed often. Those people also seem to talk more, about themselves or in general, compared to my other friends, so the mutuality is what makes me feel closer to them. Even people I interact with daily can feel very distant from me though, like my family, because I distrust them more than my friends, so it's not just about the consistency thing. It's also about how much I hide from them. But my friends also won't see my daily habits as much, either because they're online friends or because I don't do those things outside of the house as much/at all. But also my family will filter many things through their neurotypical lense, like my ADHD traits as laziness or autism as shyness. I guess falling into how well they know others (as my mom especially is pretty ableist to people) and thus how they know themselves (I notice some neurodivergent traits in my family, even though I'm not gonna armchair diagnose for obvious reasons. Even then, neurotypicals & sane people have to conform themselves to fit the standards they created and they see themselves inside that framework. There isn't actually such thing as a neurotypical brain, since that can change instantly depending on the next version of the DSM or that person's proximity to mad traits, so it is not a biological thing that even neurodivergent advocates paint it as. There is, however, a neurotypical person, who benefits from privileges that a neurodivergent cannot. It is a social construct similar to race in that way, where both biological/medical and social factors influence their creation).