Who are we?
Alright, something amazing happened to our very own TSP member, The Anonymous Poppy, earlier this week.
It all started when famous actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, from movies like 10 Things I Hate About You, Brick, 500 Days of Summer and Inception responded to the following statement by some one he follows on this site called Tumblr:
☐ Single ☐ Taken ☑ Unable to fall in love with normal people due to too many perfect celebrities/fictional characters
Joseph's response was this:
Of course, “celebrities” and “fictional characters” are actually the same thing.
After he wrote that response on Tumblr, he linked to it on another website called Twitter. It was at this point that our Poppy saw it and responded to his tweet with this:
But everyone is fictional, not just celebs, no?
And then, and this is the AMAZING part, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, one of my current favorite actors, not only read her Tweet but "retweeted" it to his 190,961 followers.
Holy cow!
The Anonymous Poppy is anonmymous no more! She should change her TSP name to "The No-Longer-Anonymous Poppy"!
I'll let this just sink in for a second. Seriously, I'm so jealous!
And now, my (probably unnecessarily) lengthy response to the subject matter (because who would I be, really, if I had an opinion on something but didn't share it? And I have an opinion on everything!).
I agree with the sentiment of Poppy's statement completely. And I think it works in a couple different ways.
I'm fictional to you (and I think this was the way that Joseph Gordon-Levitt was using the term), because the person you know me as is formed in your mind from what you are able to piece together from how I act. It takes into account my motivations, intentions and hopes but only my perceived motivations, intentions and hopes. I could have been lying about being okay with helping with that one thing that one time. You don't actually know what is going on in my head. Your ability to know that only comes from my willingness to share it and my ability to express it. Or also your ability to just intuit it, but then there you are only guessing.
There are lots of examples of how this fictional person varies depending on who you are interacting with. A perfect one is from when I first started spending more time with my wife around both her family and my family (way back when we were just starting to date!). Her family constantly made jokes about how difficult and grumpy she can be, and my family (neighbors obviously included) constantly made jokes about how it was amazing that someone who was so nice and sweet would be with me.
I found this so interesting at the time, that the impression of Keri that her family had was so completely different than the impression that she gave to me and most everyone around her. I don't think anyone from college would describe Keri as difficult and grumpy. She was as sweet as pie!
Now Keri's family knows that she is nice and sweet, but they also grew up with her and know that historically, as she was growing up, she could difficult and grumpy. Specifically, from what I hear, she was a pill until high school!
[I hope no one feels like I am picking on Keri or her family here (specifically, them), I just really did find this dichotomy so interesting. Trust me, Keri really is as sweet and nice as she seems and her family is as supportive as supportive can be!]
This is why I often get very frustrated when I interact with people who knew me while growing up. Who I was while growing up, or how I thought of myself in High School, vs. who I became during college are very different people. I feel different, and it can be difficult when people still treat me as if I was the person they knew. But it isn't their fault that I went and became more myself (read the last paragraph)! Their impression of me no longer jives with reality all the time.
But that's the easy way that we are all "fictional". It is obvious that everyone is going to have a different impression of everyone else, I mean we're all unique snowflakes who see the world differently!
We're all fictional (And I think this is the way Poppy was using the term, please correct me!) because we change how we present ourselves to the outside world, depending on where we are and who we are around, and that way we present ourselves is never completely true.
Though, I think using the word, "fictional", to describe this is a sort of cynical way of thinking about it.
I like to think about it slightly differently, at least personally. I think that being completely yourself is hard. People have different expectations of you, whether that be who they want you to be, or who they think you are, or who you were in the past (all that stuff I was just talking about), and it is so much easier to be what other people want you to be, or who you were in the past, than to disrupt the status quo by being different. I at least almost feel like I am letting people down when who I am doesn't match their expectations. Plus, being yourself is terrifying! What if they don't like you?
But, it isn't that you are inventing a new you, a "fictional" you, I think of it is just presenting a subset of who you are, a view through foggy glasses so to speak, or to use a technical math term, a homomorphism of yourself.
Going back to my frustrations about going home, I don't necessarily do anything to change their impressions. Going home is sort of like going back in time. I've been living on my own (off an on, I do go home sometimes!) for 5+ years, where even though I don't necessarily do them in a timely manner, I have to take care of my own dishes. Yet when I go home, I'm awful about doing dishes. I never do them. It is like I'm in high school again.
I also cultivate this image of myself as a complete slacker. And I am a bit of a slacker, but not to the degree that I play it up, both in person and even on this website. But then it upsets me when people think I don't care about accomplishing things in this world.
So, why am I blathering so much about "fictional" mes? Well, 1) I find it interesting, 2) this brings me to what I think of as a "best" friend.
"Best" friends are those people who you show (or who can see) the real you, and not the "foggy" one that everyone else sees. And vice versa. That mutual understanding and that connection is what puts them in that "best" category. And having been in this "best" category before doesn't necessarily get you the right to be in it forever. People change and you have to keep up.
This is sort of what I was referring to when I made it one of my new years resolutions "to be a better friend". To make an effort to reconnect and re-get-to-know those friends that I feel are slipping away over time.
Anyway, to try and bring this rambling piece back to the topic that started it, I think calling how we present ourselves to the world, being "fictional" is sort of a cynical way to think about it. I like to think of it as an effort at being "ourselves", but not always being able make it all the way there.
But the more genuine we can be, the better!
25 February 2011 06:21am UTC • 224 views • 5 comments
Tagged with personality, friends, twitter, poppy, josephgordonlevitt
★ ★
Add a comment!
You must be a member to do that! Become a member or login!
Subscribe to the feeds:
5 comments
Dread Pirate Benjamin
25 February 2011 02:27pm UTC
I think it is safe to say that I hate this post. Well, I like the first half! Sometimes I write on a topic that I find interesting and then realize when I get to the bottom that I don't have anything interesting to say. But at that point, I have already invested all that time and energy writing, so I feel like I should post it. Ugh.
Swordsman Satchel
25 February 2011 06:09pm UTC
It was good! Sorry for often having an impression of you as a great badminton player. You've changed, I get it. I guess I'm just better than you now...
Seamonster Mom
25 February 2011 07:04pm UTC
Congratulations, Poppy!
Loved your post, Dread. I personally don't think you've changed a bit since you were about a year old. Well, you've gotten bigger, smarter and more talented, but you have remained just as lovable, distinctive, outgoing and enthusiastic about life and those around you.
Dread Pirate Benjamin
25 February 2011 08:00pm UTC
Satchel, thanks for making an effort to see the new me! You're so kind! And all I have to say is bring it on! I'm going to destroy you the next time we play. You'll be so demoralized that you won't be able smile for a month.
An Martha, aww, gee! Not on my website mom! Geez!
The Anonymous Poppy
26 February 2011 12:22pm UTC
Aaaaahahahah. Awesome. You blogged about that thing that happened to me on the twitter! XD (My favorite part of this post might be the solid line that you drew to let my experience sink in for your readers.)
Also, thank you for once again referring to my "changing to become more like yourself" thing. Just to (finally) give credit where it's due with regards to that one, I should disclose that I got that idea from a novel. Specifically, A Scholar of Magics (don't go right out and read it; it's a sequel) by Caroline Stevermer. If I may quote:
Lambert tucked the statutes under his arm and thought it over. "Maybe you're right. Maybe I can't study magic without changing a little bit. Maybe you can't study anything without changing a bit. Maybe everyone changes--but when they do, it's mostly to get more like themselves. So just think. In three years, you'll be even more like Jane Brailsford than you are now."
(It might also be worth noting at this juncture -- though it's probably not -- that Jane Brailsford is the one fictional character that I identify with more than any other, ever. Including Lucy Pevensie. I mean, she teaches mathematics at a French finishing school at the turn of the century, is obsessed with fashion and mechanics, possesses a prodigious appetite, and can do magic! I'd say that sounds exactly like me....)
Anyway, I think that I actually meant both of the definitions of "fictional" that you offer here, Benji. In fact, I don't really see how they mean different things! You drawing particular conclusions based on my actions and me presenting different actions based on your expectations (to simply your arguments nearly to the point of absurdity) kind of seem like the same thing to me. They definitely feed off of each other.
I guess a really big contributing factor in why I think of real people as "fictional" is my participation in Real Person fandoms. (I hate to bring everything I say back to fandom, guys, but it's a big part of my life!) Some fans don't have the knack for real person fandoms; they can't get it straight in their head that the person they're a fan of is fictional. That the person who they're a fan of is very similar to a real person -- they have the same name, the same social security number, the same hair (if we could learn all the facts about them, they would all match up!) -- but they are not the same person. They are merely a fictionalized version of that person. (Fans who do not get this distinction are easy to spot, seeing as how they are creepy as fuck.) You know, Sady Doyle actually made this point better than me and she wasn't even talking about fandom. Allow me to quote from the essay she wrote when Michael Jackson died (I'm sorry; this quote is kinda long):
The thing is: celebrities, they belong to you.
This isn’t completely true, of course. They’re people. They don’t, or shouldn’t, belong to anyone but themselves. But to be a writer, an artist, a musician, or any sort of entertainer, is to give people little shreds of yourself – over, and over, and over again. This is true no matter how commercial, or calculated, or patently artificial the stuff you produce might be: even if you’re putting on an act, even if you’re putting on an act that has a lot of creators, it’s still a document of you, what you said or did or how you moved or how you sounded at a certain time; it doesn’t exist without you.
If it works – this process of giving yourself to people – it works only because those pieces of you speak to people: they allow people to project their own meanings, or feelings, or needs, or actual or desired identities, onto you. Every single person who takes up that little shred of your life will end up putting more of themselves than of you into it (because they don’t know you, obviously) but what they end up with, in the end, is a version of you: a mental construct, maybe (generously) 5% actual You-the-Person and 95% You-as-Composed-of-Associations-and-Projections, some chimerical weird imaginary friend who somehow carries all of the feelings of solace or joy or excitement that they got from your work, and toward whom they feel all the kinship or gratitude or friendliness anyone would naturally feel toward someone who gave them all this, who gave it over and over, saying, implicitly: for you, for you, this is all for you, I love you. Of course, of course, they care about you. You, the Celebrity; You, the Imaginary Friend. Even if you might not actually be able to stand them. Even if they might not actually be able to stand you. Even if you are nothing like what they imagine.
This seems obviously true (to me, at least) for celebrities. But, it's also totally true for everyone else as well. I mean, this idea of there being a document of "you at a certain time" that Sady talks about here, I kind of talked about that with @ZuriBella after JGL retweeted my tweet. I was concerned about JGL's followers reading back in my tweets (doubtful), and she said "@poppisima There is some point of pride in posting things that do matter to you even just matter for a second." And then I tweeted:
"It's both neat and mortifying to have that snapshot of who you were and the thing that mattered to you right in that moment preserved online"
"Of course, in a much more real sense, that document of "me" that I've preserved online is, you know, pretty much completely fictional."
"Just to bring things full circle here. I'd be lying if I said everything about "me" that I put online isn't calculated to a specific effect."
Maybe I just like lying and presenting a "fictional" facade more than the rest of you do (in fact, I'm almost certain that this is true), but I often feel like I'm disguising myself, presenting a fictionalized version of who I really am to the people that I'm interacting with. Sometimes I do this more deliberately than at other times. I guess, in the end, I agree with your conclusions, Benji. I really am only myself around my closest friends. And, the more friends I'm around, the more like myself I really am.
Ugh, sorry for leaving such a wretchedly long comment. I kind of warned you, though.