I realized people aren't seeing me. people are seeing ideas of me and it was those ideas that kept me depressed and paranoid all these years and I realized I wasn't alone. I don't want to live in a world where we live in ideas of one another. I want to live in a world where we live in the presence of one another, the real people.
You might also like
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, we feel all their actions, all their sufferings.
Herman Melville — Moby-Dick
The eye is not merely a physical organ, but the supreme instrument of touch, and we see only with our eyes open to the world; blindness is not the absence of sight but the refusal to look.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty — Phenomenology of Perception
Reflecting on these efforts, it strikes me that in much the same way I would fill in all the action in a comic book between the panels, I was reaching to understand adult relations—an unchartered land of intrigue, heartbreak and some little thing called "love". There was no guide, there was no chatbot to inquire of.
Todd Krieger