A Rather Excellent Return

Garazi Izar | The Sacred Interference

Most people don't think a person capable of what they haven't yet seen them do. It's a natural response.

Fair enough.

Then sometimes they see it.

And sometimes—allow me one thoroughly obnoxious pat on my own back—what they see turns out to be rather good.

There. I said it. I'll recover.

People can get very attached to an opinion of you. It saves time. No reconsidering. No annoying new information. You were whatever they decided you were, and apparently that's that.

I've always found this fascinating.

One mistake becomes your range. Something they don't understand becomes something unserious. Confidence gets rounded up to arrogance; ability gets rounded down to luck. And if you're doing something unusual before there's much for anybody else to look at, somebody will inevitably find a smaller word for it.

A hobby, maybe.

Holly Hobbie?

More like holy hobby.

Anyway.

The math people do on each other is terrible. They count certain things twice and other things not at all. They take a fraction of a person and call it the sum. They give enormous weight to whatever confirms their original estimate and somehow apply a discount to everything that complicates it.

I wouldn't let some of these people split a dinner check.

The interesting ones aren't necessarily the people who dislike you. Dislike is fairly straightforward. It's the people who like you.

Someone can genuinely like you and still underestimate you. Someone can care about you and still have a number in mind. They can admire your confidence right up until it exceeds their estimate. They can encourage you, love you, enjoy you, and still be surprised when you don't remain where they mentally placed you.

That's the part nobody likes talking about.

Affection doesn't automatically make us accurate. Sometimes the people closest to us are working with information that stopped being useful a long time ago. Familiarity can make people remarkably confident about what they know.

I'm not terribly interested in diagnosing all of them.

Maybe they meant nothing by it. Maybe they couldn't see it. Maybe they didn't want to. After a certain point, who cares? I've spent enough perfectly good afternoons trying to understand why somebody said some stupid thing.

Sometimes the thing was simply stupid.

What interests me more is how easily another person's calculation can become your own.

You begin making yourself more understandable. More reasonable. You explain things that don't require explanations. You hear yourself saying, “Oh, I'm just doing this little thing,” when there is nothing particularly little about the amount of yourself you've put into it.

Sometimes it's easier to reduce yourself by ten percent than deal with the room.

But ten percent here, ten percent there, and eventually you're doing their math for them.

Fuck that.

Criticism is different. If the work is bad, tell me why. If the idea has a hole in it, show me where. I can use that. But “I don't see it” is not the same as “there is nothing there.”

People confuse those constantly.

And yes, being underestimated can piss you off. Sometimes fuck you, I'll show you gets the next thing made. Sometimes it gets you through the afternoon.

Fine.

Just don't make it your life's work.

At some point you have to get interested in your own life again.

You go about your business. You learn something. You make something. You mess something up. You get better at something else. You become interested in some completely unrelated subject and suddenly know far more about it than anyone around you requested.

This is one of my specialties.

Your taste changes. Your standards change. You become harder to impress and easier to delight. You learn the difference between somebody having a point and somebody simply having an opinion. You stop explaining certain decisions. You discover that not everything requires an answer.

Meanwhile, somebody may still be working from the same estimate.

This is where I begin to enjoy myself.

A person meets one version of you and thinks they've encountered your capacity.

That's a lot of confidence for somebody working with so few variables.

There are entire portions of another person's life you will never see. Private disciplines. Abandoned attempts. Sudden interests. Things learned for no sensible reason. Skills acquired almost accidentally. Ideas that sat around doing nothing until one day they became useful.

People accumulate.

Quietly, mostly.

And that matters because subtraction is easy to notice. Multiplication often isn't.

Nobody sees every book you read, every time you changed your mind, every attempt that taught you something, every hour you spent getting less terrible at something. Frankly, nobody should. Imagine having to issue updates.

Good afternoon. Since we last spoke, I have developed three new interests, reconsidered two assumptions and become unexpectedly competent at something nobody asked me to do.

Exhausting.

Better to get on with it.

You surprise yourself.

That's one of the nicer parts.

Not everybody else. Yourself.

Knowing when somebody has a point. Knowing when they very much do not. Knowing when you're about to spend forty-five minutes explaining yourself to somebody committed to misunderstanding you and deciding you'd rather make a sandwich.

That's worth something.

Someone thought you couldn't do something.

Then you did it.

Someone thought what you were making was a hobby.

Maybe it was.

Who decided hobbies had to be mediocre?

Actually, no.

I'm busy.

There may even be another hobby.

God help us.

There is a lovely fantasy in which everybody who underestimated you eventually understands. They come around. They see everything differently. Perhaps there is tasteful applause.

And then what?

You still have Tuesday.

You still need groceries. Something is unfinished. There's an idea you can't quite get right. There are people you actually enjoy. There are things you want to learn and things you haven't thought of yet.

Tuesday remains remarkably unimpressed by personal triumph.

I respect that about Tuesday.

And this, for me, is where the whole thing becomes lighter.

Some people were wrong.

Some people were unkind.

Some people couldn't imagine what they hadn't seen yet.

Some may still think exactly what they thought before.

Okay.

They can.

You don't have to make them smaller because they made you feel smaller. You don't have to drag them into the present and insist they appreciate everything properly. You don't need a revised opinion delivered with a bow on it.

There are better uses for an afternoon.

I've got things to do.

And sometimes you just look around at what you've made and think, Well. Would you look at that.

The whole time they were subtracting, I was multiplying.

Well.

A rather excellent return.