Paradigms
By: Sharon Ferrell, July 2004

Authoress' Notes: Just a little freeform musing. Who is it inspired by? Many, many people. And I probably won't tell you if you ask. ;)

It's hard when you've been looking at a person, making fun of them for inconsequential things such as a funny way of talking, bad art, outrageous hair, a lack of hair, or goofy shoes and without the person knowing you begin to learn that they're actually a person, a three-dimensional being who's had hopes, dreams, goofy childhood friends, or have experienced hard times, perhaps lost people they've loved. The specifics of what you learn doesn't matter, any little thing can signify to you a personality trait or faucet of the person's history. It can be as inconsequential as learning the person's favourite pet, or their favourite band. Your perception of the person changes from a cardboard cutout to a full personality, and you begin to feel sympathy.

I've had this happen to me a few times. Once it happened to a person I absolutely despised because of his slowness, many people I adored, but just for the art they put out, and not for the people they were, and another because he made a mention of religion, and I was afraid he was ready to preach at me. Each time it was disturbing to have my perceptions change as I begin to know the person not just for the two-dimensional personality I pigeonholed them into, and I began to feel- much against my own will- empathy for them. One I regretted tormenting, one I learned to love even more (something that probably wasn't healthy), and the other became the best friend I could ever had.

Sometimes people say the best way to get to know an artist is through looking at their art, but that's not completely true. Sometimes perhaps the art makes them look like a totally outrageous and outgoing person, or maybe very serious and intellectual. I know my art probably shows a very skewed perception of who I am. My Internet personality is built around the happy-go-lucky cartoonist side of me, who is often being bold, loud, goofy, opinionated and yes, often a fantard. This personality is very different from what I show to my parents, and a complete contrast to how I am around school. Of course, we all act differently around our parents than we do around our friends. That being said, between the two, I think my Internet personality is closer to who I am with myself, who I am in my head, but then again, in reality it probably swings between the two.

We all have paradigms of everyone, including ourselves. What are our paradigms of people built upon? What they look like? The art they post on the Internet? How they talk or type? What they write in their LiveJournal? The music they listen to? In a lot of cases, I know people who were completely different from how I perceived them to be from their art in their writing or LiveJournal. How do we build a proper perception of a person? Who decides what is the proper perception of a person? Sometimes even the person themselves don't have the proper idea of who they are, either degrading themselves or thinking themselves to be ridiculously superior.

The question of what is the proper paradigm for people aside, I have to say sometimes we do pass people by or put them down before we get to know them thinking that we know better, that we know who they are, before finding out not only they're not who we thought they are, but that that they're more like us than we thought. It can happen to even the most open-minded of us- it's hard to ignore the legacy of stereotyping that our ancestors have left us. Not that stereotyping doesn't have a purpose- it gives us easy behaviour patterns to follow when trying to guess another's moves. However, stereotypes are just that-placeholders. Placeholders for actual personalities.

I guess it's like the philosophy I try to take with movies or books- I try not to judge them until I've seen or read and understood the whole thing. While it's probably impossible to do the same thing for people, I implore you to at least try. Sometimes your own place in the world gives you a very skewed perception of things; sometimes traits that are minor in the person's life are magnified in your vision, or perhaps you've been told many rumors before you actually got to meet the person, or more commonly, maybe you don't realize something that is very important in understanding the person's motivations.

So while it may be impossible as humans to be fair and understanding all the time, we should at least try. After all, you don't want people to have the wrong paradigm of you, do you?