The Importance of Being Earnest (or My Own Personal Ozone)

One of the more interesting effects of the events of the past year where my personal life is concerned has to do with shifts in perception. People protect themselves from each other in the most fascinating ways. We each develop methods of communication that end up not being communication at all, but more a form of dance that we do to avoid any possibility of exposure to embarrassment, vulnerability, weakness. Personal ozone, if you like. God forbid that anyone should have the chance to step on our orgueil, for example (a French word that can loosely be translated to 'false pride', but I’ve never been able to find a real equivalent in English). I see it in business all the time. The image that we project to our clients, colleagues, suppliers, employees and superiors. The image that they project to us. It's a dog eat dog world out there, and apparently Norm isn't the only one wearing Milk-Bone underwear. I understand why we do this in business, the necessity of it. Hell, I'm pretty good at it myself. But it's also glaringly obvious (to me, anyway) that the most successful and productive business relationships I have are the few where I've managed to knock down those barriers. No games. No false images. Just straight-forward, honest, tell-it-like-it-is business. WYSIWYG for people. It's interesting that we go to so much trouble to develop WYSIWYG as an ergonomic necessity for the tools we work with, but rarely does it occur to us to apply the same logic to the interpersonal aspect of our lives. Enter the double-edged sword of my personal life. The past year was a hard one. I made some pretty serious mistakes. I almost lost my life on 2 occasions as a direct result. I ended up isolating myself, cutting myself off from the people around me completely. Hitting the RESET button, as it were. Recently I started to try and rebuild the social structure around me. Slowly. And it's a lot more arduous a process than I thought it would be. The problem is me and my shifting perceptions. Before all of this happened, I was very good at playing the game (although I would have never called it that at the time - it wouldn’t have occurred to me that there WAS a game). I knew what to say, who to say it to, when and how to say it. I was very adept at knowing what image individual people needed to have of me for them to feel comfortable with me, and vice versa. I'm not saying that everything was a pretence or false. On the contrary. But I believe that the vast majority of people cater to one another's perceptual needs to some degree or another as an means to make others feel comfortable and accepted, and to gain acceptance or feel comfortable ourselves. It's a simple and common component of human socialisation. But when I hit that infamous reset button, I stopped socializing. I had a lot of time to think. All of my free time was spent alone. I needed to re-evaluate priorities. Two of the biggest themes that emerged from that whole experience were a)the realisation of just how short life is, and b) the beauty of (as well as my need for) simplicity. Unbeknownst to me, my perception had changed, and I soon found out that the way I would start dealing with people in my personal life would also change. I stopped wasting time with projected images. I became much blunter. On one side I started being a lot more frank about telling people what I thought, not sugar coating things they didn't want to hear. On the other, I didn't start editing the verbalisation of my feelings towards people to conform to some society-imposed standard or image. I (inadvertently) started incorporating WYSIWYG into the relationships that have started emerging. What a mistake. While my perception has changed, I forgot to consider the other variable in the equation: Other people's perceptions haven't, necessarily. People still expect restraint and political correctness. They just can't hear blatant, uncensored honesty, good or bad, because it CAN'T be real. There has to be some ulterior motive. It must be some attempt at manipulation. Or they are being told things they either can't handle or don't want to hear. Our personal ozone is the protection we've developed against the cynicism that seems to have become fundamental in our dealings with others. I understand it. I even (grudgingly) accept it. And I'll certain be reverting to a more restrained, business style approach in the future, when it comes to relationships, I think, where my personal life is concerned. But I can't help but wonder: If people were to drop their personal ozone, would it really destroy them? Or would they simply adapt and spend a lot less time looking for ways to understand each other, because everything would be there, right in front of them. They might even spend more time actually enjoying the people around them for what they really are. After all, life really IS short, and simplicity really IS a beautiful thing.