The Great Mystery of My Life

By Rom Watson
c. September 1, 2013

I could never be a spy.  If captured, all the enemy would have to do is play a recording of my speaking voice and I would tell them anything they wanted to know in order to make that torture stop.

When I hear myself speaking it sounds good, but when it’s recorded and played back to me: it turns my stomach.

I’ve always felt this way, so it took me a long time to realize that my voice doesn’t seem to bother anyone else.  Not only have people complimented my speaking voice, more than one person has suggested I record books on tape.  How is it that the way others perceive me differs so greatly from my own perception?

This is the great mystery of my life.  I have never been able to comprehend how other people perceive me.

For instance, some people like me right from the start and other people don’t, also right from the start.  Both reactions puzzle me because they seem to come out of nowhere.  A few years ago, a new acquaintance found me consistently amusing.  Their amusement was way out of proportion to my feeble utterances, but this person took a liking to me right away.  I’m glad they did, but . . .what did I do to charm them?

Conversely, when a person has a negative reaction to me I can actually feel them shutting me out and mentally turning away.  But looking back at what was said or done, it’s still a mystery as to why they had a negative reaction.  I sometimes feel I’m living in a time before the invention of mirrors, wondering, “What are they seeing?”  (And, “What are they hearing?”  Is it a vocal inflection that’s putting them off?)

Perhaps the solution is to hire a crew to follow me with video cameras.  Maybe the resultant footage would solve the mystery.  (This may not be why people appear on reality TV shows, but it would seem to be the only benefit.)  However, on further reflection, even hiring a camera crew wouldn’t help, since watching the videotape would only reveal how I perceive it, not how others perceive it.

Last year a friend wrote in an e-mail, “Sometimes I wonder if the qualities I admire most in myself are the very things that other people can’t stand about me.  I spend a lot of time thinking about that.”

I, too, now spend a lot of time thinking about that.  It has the makings of a paradox.

Since I treat everyone the same, what accounts for the fact that some people find me very funny and gravitate toward me, and other people avoid me and are barely civil?  I’m not going to change my behavior, (you can’t please everyone), and it it’s not even my business what others think of me.  However, I find it an interesting topic.

It turns out I’m not the only one who finds it interesting.  I recently read the book “What the Dog Saw” by Malcolm Gladwell, and one of the articles collected in this compendium of pieces he wrote for The New Yorker, entitled “The New-Boy Network,” is about this very topic.  Gladwell sites a study conducted at Harvard University by Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, and also a study conducted by Frank Bernieri at the University of Toledo.  In these experiments, observers made snap judgments about teachers after watching two seconds of videotape.  These snap judgments turned out to be remarkably similar to assessments made by students who studied with the teachers for an entire semester.  Gladwell writes: “Bernieri and Ambady believe that the power of first impressions suggests that human beings have a particular kind of prerational ability for making searching judgments about others.”

What I took away from the article is this: I will never know why people instantly like or dislike me, because they don’t know why they instantly like or dislike me.  They are simply reacting to me, and their like or dislike happens before they think about it.

Which means the great mystery of my life will never be solved.

Fortunately, I occasionally meet someone who is able to look past their perception of me, and in turn I’m able to look past my perception of them.  These are the people I do my best to treasure.