Post #3101739

More fragments. More emotionally charged details. More disconnected observations for people to organize into narratives. More opportunities for confusion. More interpretive layers stacked on top of older interpretive layers. Eventually I started realizing that some people no longer experienced me directly at all. They experienced accumulated information about me. And honestly, I don’t even fully blame anyone for that. I think human beings naturally begin relating to each other through metadata once enough emotional history accumulates. We stop encountering each other in the present moment and start interacting with predictive models built from old conversations, old pain, old observations, third-party interpretations, partial truths, emotional residue, and unfinished narratives. And once that happens, repair becomes incredibly difficult. Not always because people hate each other. Not always because anyone is intentionally lying. But because everybody is trying to solve each other instead of experiencing each other. I think that’s the grief underneath all of this for me. Realizing that some relationships cannot be repaired through more explanation because the problem is no longer a lack of information. The problem is that too much narrative has accumulated around both people for genuine presence to easily emerge anymore. (7/8)