Being Seen

Last week at work, I found myself in a virtual meeting, my eyes fixated on that little box where my camera feed is presented to my coworkers. Was I at the right angle? Did the parting of my hair have appropriate volume? What were my coworkers thinking? It felt like the thousand pins holding my face as one were slowly being pulled from my flesh; my mind itself enveloped in a pool of anguish, surrounded by the sharks of this unraveling. I couldn't focus on the meeting. Everything blurred. I turned my camera off for a brief break, and I said out loud "this is too much": I forgot to mute my microphone.

My despair was with being seen itself.

The issue is not in being perceived in the material realm; rather, the issue is being socially transmuted from person into a collection of things: judgements about your looks here, criticisms of your thoughts there, micro adjustments of your divorced representation in every interaction. This reduction of person into thing is a miracle of cognitive necessity: the moments of your mind truly entering another persons interiority and seeing their full essence, beyond their shallow and immediate actions, is short-lived and possibly nonexistent.

Each person in that meeting is managing their own interior world and their personal life. There simply is no space or time to engage with the full human in front of them. Abstraction of people is necessary in low to moderate contexts to function.

Just a month ago, I wrote to my friends in a hypomanic fever analyzing Simone Weil's theory of attention as prayer and the inevitability of grace. At that moment, I offered that interior world. I was comfortable and not despairing. What's the difference?

On one hand, my hypomanic fevers are marked with what truly feels like a flame that envelops my chest. In this fire, these people that I see: this friend, that friend, their friends, are unified. The only thing that changed was my perception: they still are individuals, but in this daze all humans seem to be united under providence and grace. Why would I fear judgement in the presence of this flaming grace?

On the other hand, the camera captures me performing what I distinctly lack from my coworkers. It seems to me that they know what to say, they understand how to enter the conversation, they effortlessly look like they belong in their environment. Meanwhile, I never know what to say, I don't know how to enter a conversation without an explicit question, I always seem like there is a missing thread between my body and my environment. On top of this, I am constantly performing eye contact by looking just above my camera. During weekly check-in meetings with my boss, I constantly look downwards, away from the camera, to pretend that I am looking at his face directly while he speaks. The conferencing software is always minimized.

The performance of humanity at the physical and shallow scale is simply too much.

But what appears shallow to me is profoundly deep, and entire universes of mental models are built from these waters. The engine of the majority of necessary human interaction dips into that well, building entire webs of communities under ambiguous contexts.

The tragedy is that the more I am aware of my lack the more visible it becomes. I imagine being a ghost to be more soothing than this fleshy reality.