Do The People Closest to You Actually Know You?

Telling family about something important and watching them completely miss the point. They hear the words and understand nothing. They respond to something that wasn’t said. They make it about something it isn’t about. The conversation ends and they think they get it and they are so far off it’s almost funny except it’s too sad to be funny.

This happens constantly. With parents, with siblings, or with people who’ve known someone their entire life. They think they understand. They reference history like that history tells them who someone is. They bring up childhood like that childhood explains everything. They know so little it’s shocking they don’t realize how little they know.

Friends aren’t better. They have their idea of who someone is and that idea is set. New information that contradicts it gets ignored. Growth that changed things gets missed. They are still relating to whoever someone was three years ago, five years ago, whenever the friendship formed and their understanding of that person froze.

The relationship continues on false pretenses. They think they are close to someone real. They are close to a version that’s been presented to them, carefully curated, designed to be acceptable. Everything that doesn’t fit that version gets filtered out before it reaches them.

This means whole parts of life can’t be shared. The struggles they wouldn’t understand. The thoughts they’d judge. The feelings they’d try to fix or dismiss. Those parts get carried alone because bringing them into the relationship would break the illusion these people have about who they are dealing with.

Phone calls become performances. The version answers the phone and has the conversation the version is supposed to have. Pleasantries happen, updates get shared, and nothing real gets said. The call ends and everyone feels connected and the connection is completely fake.

They ask surface questions and want surface answers. How’s work? Fine. How’s life? Good. How are things? Great. The questions aren’t invitations to honesty. They are checkboxes. The answers fulfill the social requirement without meaning anything.

When something hard happens, telling them is complicated. They’ll care but they’ll care wrong. They’ll offer solutions that don’t fit the problem. They’ll minimize what needs acknowledging. They’ll make it about themselves somehow. So the hard thing gets handled privately and they never know it happened.

They have opinions about someone’s life based on information they don’t have. They think someone should do this, should want that, should feel some other way. Their advice is useless because it’s based on a fantasy version of who someone is and what they are dealing with. Taking that advice would be absurd but rejecting it creates tension.

The relationship has history so it continues. Years invested, memories shared, roles established. Walking away would be noticed and questioned. Staying means continuing the performance indefinitely. The performance gets more exhausting the longer it goes but stopping it feels impossible.

Sometimes they say things that reveal how wrong their understanding is. They attribute motivations that don’t exist. They explain someone to other people incorrectly. They tell stories that paint a picture completely different from reality. Hearing this is surreal. Who are they talking about? Not anyone real.

Meeting new people who don’t have the wrong understanding is refreshing. They don’t have preconceptions to maintain. They meet whoever someone actually is right now. The relationship can start from truth instead of from performance. These new relationships often feel more real than decade-old ones.

That creates guilt. Shouldn’t the people who’ve known someone longest know them best? Shouldn’t family understand better than strangers? The fact that they don’t feels like failure somehow. Like something is wrong that the closest relationships are the fakest ones.

Trying to fix it feels pointless. Showing them something real just gets misunderstood. They interpret everything through their existing beliefs about who someone is. The new information gets bent to fit the old understanding. Nothing actually updates.

So the loneliness persists inside relationships that look close from the outside. They love someone who doesn’t exist. They are devoted to a version that’s been maintained for their benefit. The real person underneath that version stays unknown and unseen and the people who claim to love them most have no idea they are missing anything.

The holidays come and everyone gathers and talks and laughs and someone is in the room but not really there. The version is there doing its job. The real person is alone in a crowd of people who love them without knowing them at all. 

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