David McElroy

A sweet little girl amused me at dinner tonight — but she embarrassed her mother.

Kayleigh is 4 years old and her mom is one of the managers of a restaurant where I’m a frequent customer. I was there for dinner Friday when Kayleigh came in with her mom and I got to meet her. She’s an outgoing little girl and she likes to talk.

When she found out my name, her face lit up and she said, “You come in here all the time!” I asked her how she knew that. She looked proud of herself as she explained how she knew who I was.

“My momma has a crush on you!” she said happily.

Her mother turned purple in the face and they suddenly had to leave.

I’ve told this amusing story to several people tonight, both online and in real life. A common response from well-meaning people is that I should ask the mom to go out sometime. I’ve tried to explain why not — and I finally had a sudden insight.

I’m not interested in Kayleigh’s mom. She’s attractive enough and she’s nice enough, but something’s missing. She’s not an “alpha woman.” Something clicked and I suddenly realized something I’d never noticed before.

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I’ve never worried about my status in the world. I was always so confident about myself that I never tried to make people like me and I never worried about where I fit in a hierarchy.

Some people liked me. Some people didn’t like me. I had friends. Some hated me. But everybody knew where I fit wherever I was.

As a child, I was the leader of the groups I ran with, but I never really thought about it. In school, I had high status in classrooms because I was typically the new “smartest kid in class” when I moved to a new town. I was acknowledged as a leader.

In high school, I won top leadership positions in the things I cared about, at school and church. I wasn’t the most popular kid, but I was the one you wanted in charge to get things done. On my early jobs, I had quick status. I was the youngest managing editor of a daily newspaper in the country at 21. I was younger than all the people I managed.

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When people look at me, they see an illusion. They don’t see the real me.

That’s true of you, too. Some of what others see in us is the illusion we project. Another big part of what they see — probably the biggest part — comes from their unconscious assumptions about human beings. And a bit of it is actual truth that leaks out through the cracks in the masks we wear.

You could spend your life studying one solitary person — as a full-time job — and still not understand every single thing there is to know about that person. Humans are too complex on the inside. We often have little understanding of ourselves. Even the best of us keep discovering new things that later seem obvious.

Since it’s impossible to know another person completely — and few are even interested — it’s natural that we would develop quick abstractions for those we see around us. We project what we want to see onto those we perceive as good or even ideal. We project what we expect to see (or fear we’ll see) onto those we perceive as bad. We go through life with this rough shorthand about others. It’s horribly inaccurate, but it’s good enough to allow us to survive.

Most people go through life believing they are known and understood by others — and that they know others, too. Some of us know better, though, and that leaves us feeling unbearably alone.

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