There are times when songs get sticky in my head, and I’m not sure why, or what I’m supposed to do with them. Sure, there are plenty of songs that get stuck in my thoughts and the message that goes with it comes with it very easily, and I don’t have to dig very deep to find the deeper message that I’m seeing in the song.
But then I encounter songs like “On The Rise” from Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, Joss Whedon’s internet sensation. It’s sung by the villain and his love interest, and while he sings in despair about the growing evil in the world and in him, she sings in joy about the harmony that seems to be growing in the world and in her.
And that’s when it hit me: They’re looking at many of the same events, but they see them through radically different opinions, coloring their views not only of the events, but of their outcome. He sees homelessness as a symptom of a larger problem of corruption; she sees the homeless problem as a chance to reach out and impact the life of another for the better. He feels powerless to make a larger impact for lasting change; she focuses on changing now for one person.
It occurs to me that we are all going through life this way: all of us see life differently based on our pasts, and it colors how we see the events that happen around us in radically different ways. My personal experiences influence my motives and how I perceive others’ motives… and thus my basic view of the world. We all have a bias that affects our basic perceptions of events and situations… so that every story has as many sides as there are participants in it, plus one more… the unbiased way things actually happened that is uncolored by anyone’s retelling.
There’s another thing to consider: sometimes our view of events is colored by an incorrect understanding or a warping of our perceptions. Let me explain: when I was growing up, I learned that I couldn’t trust adults. I couldn’t trust people to do what they said they would do, and if I wanted something done the way I needed it done, I had to do it myself. If I wanted to maintain enough control over things to keep myself safe and sane, I had to keep as much control over every aspect of my life as I could… and I learned to never trust adults. I couldn’t trust my mother; she was abusive. I couldn’t trust her husbands or boyfriends; they were abusive or fearful of her or inappropriately sexual with me (without being outright abusive… they’d tell me dirty jokes, for instance, but never touched me). I’d tell the authorities what was happening, and when I came home, she knew I’d told, and I’d get abused worse than before… so I couldn’t trust other people to protect me. Either they’d lied and told her I was the source, or they were powerless to actually stop her. Even my father, whom I adore, was powerless to make it stop; he had to work within the limits of the law and my mother was willing to waltz along the outside and that gave her a power he didn’t have.
That lack of trust, that fear of adults and authority, is something I wrestle with still. I have to make conscious decisions to trust people, and actively remind myself that there is nothing to fear. My first instinct is to distrust people’s motives or intentions… it made me paranoid. I have a tendency to think that people always mean me harm… and I have to remind myself that it isn’t always the case.
The abuse I suffered warped my perceptions. I have to actively work to shift them… but not only to shift them, to be careful that I don’t over-correct… that I don’t go from being paranoid and not trusting anyone to becoming too trusting. I have to be careful that I don’t, in my attempt to correct for the damage that was done as a child, trust people that I really shouldn’t, that I correctly recognize when the alarm is sounding because there really is genuine danger.
So the way I view the world is shaped and colored by my past and the way it was warped, but also by the ways that I choose to view, by the filter I actively choose to place over events around me. Instead of continuing to believe that most people are out to get me, I’ve chosen to believe that most people are just people and don’t mean any harm. I don’t deny that there are some sick twisted monkeys out there who do mean to do harm just because they can, but… by and large, they’re the exception. Most of us are just going through every day life trying to live it.
What about you? We’re looking at the same world, the same events… what filters are you looking through, and which ones are you going to choose to discard, or which will you choose to pick up instead? I don’t want the hopelessness that greets Dr. Horrible when he concludes that evil is on the rise.
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