In attendance at a social event this past weekend I heard the expression “she’s real people.” I haven’t heard this expression in some time and it got me thinking about what it means to be a “real” person. Why do we work so hard to be someone we are not or to fit into social circles we truly don’t belong to? What if our reality is much different from someone else’s reality; does that then make us less real to them? I think the answer might be found in the oxymoron - complicated simplicity.
Consider first, that if I set a standard of living and socializing for myself that does match your standard of living and socializing am I not meeting your standards or are you not meeting mine? Which one of us is less “real” in this case? That is a complicated question without an easy answer. So perhaps we need to look at this in terms of simplicity. It was pointed out to me recently that “things are usually not as simple as they initially appear to be.”
This reminds of a discussion I had with a friend a few weeks back. He is a highly successful specialist with a rewarding career and the luxury of building several homes; one of which has been featured internationally in architecture magazines. He grew up in a different culture and time than I did, yet we are able to appreciate our different experiences.
During our conversation about raising kids today, he explained his philosophy that teaching teenagers to make choices based on a complete understanding of consequences was not only simple but all that was really necessary. I explained that I made choices based on an understanding of the consequences yet it was not as simple as he claimed it to be and my reality was much different from the one he had experienced. Did that make his reality less real or was it my reality that wasn’t quite real? In truth they were both real, just very different.
Going back to the comment “she is real people,” I have to conclude that what she meant by the comment was that “real” doesn’t mean true, actual, or ideal, as much as it means “the same as me.”
In this context, I learned how profoundly our experiences shape our realities. People often relate easily to one another when their experiences are similar and struggle to or cannot relate when those experiences are quite different. If our realities are vastly different from one another we are bound to feel much less real to each other than when our realities are the same or similar. This fact alone does not make us less real, it makes our realities different.
Often those differences are celebrated on the surface but in the context of close intimate relationships and interconnected friendships those differences create a space between us that make us feel like true connections with one another might be impossible. Our personal experience of reality causes us to seek out people who have similar personal experiences because they feel the most real to us. But regardless of how different or alike we might be, the complicated simplicity is that we are all real people.
