Prompts on Seeing Things As We Are

A car picked me up to go to the airport last week.

The ride was an hour and 15, and by minute four I knew the driver had met his new wife last October and they got married in January. Before that, he’d had a vasectomy, yet somehow still managed to father twins with a one-night stand in Tacoma. He’s got full custody of them now, and there’s another 30-year-old daughter from a previous marriage (but don’t ask about that). The new wife is adventurous and tiny and also cracks the whip, but he needs it. He wants to retire so he can teach his kids taekwondo and coach the lacrosse team, but in the meantime he bought a foreclosed bar in the Cascades, he runs a third-party Amazon delivery center from his front yard, and on the weekends drives a party bus ferrying Pinot Grigio-drunk bachelorettes from the local winery. We’re in gridlock traffic, and he’s got ideas to spitball. He loves to read and we talk about books. He has read all of Dan Brown and Tom Clancy, but his favorite book, he says, the one that changed his life, is Siddhartha. I tell him I didn’t see that one coming.

We arrive to the airport and I’m late, so I essentially barrel roll out of his XL GMC Sierra. Today I’m 5,000 miles away. I spotted Siddhartha on the bookstore table and picked it up; you never know.

We rarely see anything clearly on our own… ourselves least of all. Selfhood isn’t self-generated, it has to bounce off something before it becomes legible: a person, a place, an object. My understanding of who I am isn’t cultivated in a vacuum; it’s this layered cobweb of interactions with friends and strangers, secondhand observations reflected back to me.

This month’s prompts were inspired by remembering the line, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are,” and looking it up to realize it is widely attributed—to my surprise—to Anaïs Nin. These prompts consider what breaks us out of our myopia; who and what shows us the version of ourselves that we’re too close to see. What distorts it, what confirms our bias, what catches the light in ways we couldn’t have generated ourselves.

xo,
LP

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1. ORIENTING POINTS

I really love these charts that I found in a book on Anaïs Nin that diagram her life through three suns: Paris, New York, Los Angeles. Around the cities are the names of people that orbited her while she lived in each place, a kaleidoscope of friendships, connections, and creative relationships.

Channel your inner Anaïs. Name 3 orienting “suns” in your life. Sources that, if you trace far enough back, much of the rest of your life radiates out from.

[They don’t have to be places! A person + a creative obsession + a year. An apartment + a mentor + your hometown. Go literal or abstract; this prompt is a little slippery on purpose.]

2. NINA SIMONE’S GUM

In 1999 Warren Ellis watched a performance by his idol, Nina Simone. Between songs, he noticed her stick her used chewing gum on a towel on top of the piano. After the show, he impulsively pocketed it. He kept the gum for 21 years, telling almost no one, until it turned up in a 2021 exhibition curated by Nick Cave.

What’s something in your possession you’ll never throw out because of whose hands it passed through first, even though it would look like garbage to anyone who found it (… perhaps it is actually garbage)?

3. WHO ME?

I was ordering a coffee and overheard one of the baristas tell her coworker, “This lady wants an Americano.” This lady, meaning me. For some reason it threw me off. It’s not an inaccurate label, but I suppose it’s just one I’ve never thought about before.

When have you seen yourself through someone else’s eyes and not recognized the person looking back? Perhaps it was a something written about you, or a photo that didn’t look like you, or hearing a recording of your own voice.

4. INVISIBLE FORCES

In this episode of the podcast Nymphet Alumni, the co-host Sam and writer Anika Levy discuss how conspiracy theorist and manifestation mindsets are two sides of the same coin; one asks “what is reality hiding?” and the other, “what is reality trying to tell me?”

What’s the story you tend to tell yourself when something unexplainable happens: is reality usually out to get you, or is it looking out for you?

5. ME SEEING YOU

Think of a person you know intimately.