In response to this.
I spent long stretches of time in the U.S. living in a kind of isolation — where it was as if I didn’t exist.
No one called me.
No one considered me a potential partner for a relationship.
People actively avoided and ignored me.
This deeply affects the psyche.
You almost begin to doubt whether you exist at all.
I’ve wanted to write a serious piece about this:
We exist — like electrons — through the process of being observed.
Just like physical matter only fully materializes when it is observed — when it is registered by attention.
Otherwise, it’s not detectable (this is a scientific fact).
I believe the same is true for people.
Because we, too, in some sense, are representatives of the material world (at least partially).
And if we don’t receive a certain amount of external confirmation that we exist in the lives of others — if we just move through the world like sacks of flesh, mere decorations no more alive than inanimate objects — we begin, quietly, to lose our minds.
It’s a heavy thing to endure.
I read once that in some indigenous tribe, the ultimate punishment was “boycott” — when the community would stop acknowledging a person’s existence, no communication, no recognition.
It’s an incredibly dramatic experience.
I know this firsthand…
I’m so grateful there are people who understand this truth.
I’ve never been able to comprehend how someone could see another person every day in an office for two years and never say hello.
Or how someone could simply look through people who don’t fit into their narrow idea of who’s “worthy” to be a friend or a lover.
I look at people with enormous interest — always.
I am never closed off to anyone.
I’m ready to open myself to the possibility of connecting with anyone, because every person to me is a whole world.
That’s why it’s always been so startling to me — especially in a place like Los Angeles, this unique world of surface-level interactions that spreads like a virus — to see how many people reduce the value of those around them to mere background scenery.
As if human beings only deserve to be noticed if they meet some external criteria.