Filling In the Blanks
I love it when the same lesson reveals itself to me in different ways.
Recently, a friend and I were talking about that phenomenon that happens when you have a crush on someone and your mind takes the couple of things you know about them and fills in the blanks with its own ideas.
So let’s say that you’ve seen the person act in ways that lead you to believe that they’re kind and funny. But next thing you know, you’ve created a whole personality for them. Not only are they kind and funny, now they’re also confident, intelligent, dependable and EXACTLY the type of person you’ve been looking for!
Your crush has now blossomed into a full-on potential partner. Except, you don’t actually know much about them!!
Earlier in that week that my friend and I had this discussion, one of my young patients saw a picture of me without my medical mask on. He said “you look different” and I laughed because I knew what he meant was that I looked different without a mask than what he expected.
His mind had seen my upper face and filled in the blanks about what the rest of my face looked like. But my real face and his imagined version of my face didn’t match up. And I totally understood his confusion. There has not been one person who I’ve seen without a mask who looked like what I imagined they’d look like when they were wearing a mask.
Our minds love to do this. And by this, I mean make stuff up. They look for meaning, patterns and shortcuts and they take a lot of liberties with reality.
This tendency of ours to fill in blanks has implications for so many things in life. We tend to make assumptions which create expectations which reality rarely lives up to.
It’s not that people look worse without a mask or that your crush’s actual personality is terrible, but we have to remember that reality is often different than what our minds extrapolate from the few data points that we have.
The lesson I’m taking away is to be aware that our brains work this way and to catch ourselves when we’re making stuff up. This will prevent us from creating unrealistic expectations of people and situations. There’s a beauty and excitement in discovering who someone or something is as they reveal it over time.
