How should one walk? What is the appropriate period of time to make eye contact with someone on the streets of Seattle? What body posture lets people know that I know what I am doing? What vocal qualities come off as confident? What are mannerism which are prescribed to be masculine? What clothing suggests that I belong? What language communicates that I am friendly, but don’t take advantage of me? When innuendos can I use that tell people I am in “the know?” What pop culture references should I adopt or know about in order to “fit in?” 

How can I reinvent my perception? Mainly I mean how can I reinvent how I think I should be perceived.  The questions asked above are questions that I have spent most of my life pondering, defining and answering for myself since middle school and vicariously defining how other should be. Not realizing I have made decisions and put expectations on people who fit or do not fit into my own prescribed way of being. This is undesirable and has reached a point in my life that it needs to be addressed.  But how? How can I reinvent a perception that I has spent a lifetime forming? Questions…

 

I can start by inviting more questions in my life. I can by accepting open-ended questions. I can accept that answers are diverse and not all answers have straight forward right and wrong ways of being. I can debunk my own perception. An area that I would like to renew is my fixation on how I am viewed by others. It is something somewhat ingrained in me. I carry myself in a certain way, I am consumed with how others view me, I am conscious of my body, body posture, my body language, my words, and my intentions. And equally so I hold others to this insurmountable standard. I think at its core, my burden of perception is a queer conscious worldview. I am full aware of my separateness or “otherness.”

 

I am your average middle child who is weird and awkward. I fancied myself with much of my youth and brain power in trying to get and maintain attention. This ranged from average things like making myself small and doing silent treatments to my parents or when I didn’t get what I wanted, to piercing my eye brow in the middle class or singing like a woman for a talent show or radical dares licking days old ranch off picnic tables. In a weird way this was my way of fitting in, I was coined the weird kid.  I definitely confirmed my separateness from others. 

 

I was always aware of how I didn’t fit in but was confused about how to fit in. I became aware of my perception. How am I perceived by others? If I hold myself a certain way, then how is it reciprocated by the other? Now I think this isn’t necessarily bad. I think analyzing the world and my place in it and how it differs from the “other” is good. And it is a wealth of  knowledge for the actor and toolbox to draw from for character, tactics, motivation, and how one carries themselves in the world. On the other side there seems as though a denial of self, a tailor to society, or to the “other” at the cost and detriment of losing the “self.” And this hyper awareness and manipulated perception lends itself to being invulnerable, manipulative, and shallow. These are traits I desire to diminish. So reinventing perception but also reinventing how one should be in the world becomes very important. This is achieved by holding open questions. 

 

By leaving questions open I welcome all the aspects which might align or not align in my own prescribed way of being. I open the possibility to change, and indeed to grow. I welcome the capacity to love and invite others in. To become that which I desire and that which I have yet to become. To give grace to myself and grace to a younger self and current self that gets caught up in a controlled manipulative perception. So my answer is to question more. Ask honestly! In order to sift through that which is prescribed culturally or one’s own beliefs how you should present yourself and conversely that which is mold able, changeable, able to grow and lacking a clear answer; that which has the capacity to become better and become more one with “self” and the “Other.” Thereafter the divide between …. Self ….. Other is filled. It’s filled with grace and love …. Oneness. There is no denial of “self” to be acceptable to the “other” but also there is understanding and shared experience with the “other.”

Photography:

Cover photo photographer: Dustin Nicols

Photographer: illuminating Dreams

Ending photo photographer: Wendy Lu