Phetasy News - Perception Is Everything

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Jul 08, 2023

Greetings from the Phetaverse!

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of media hits as well as trying to write a book about how on Earth it came to be that I would be doing things called “media hits.” It wasn’t until about five years ago that I even knew what they were called. My first time doing this kind of thing was representing independents on the Ben Shapiro Election Special in the fall of 2018. I’ve never been great at listening to myself and even worse at watching myself — but the other night, with supporters from my community, I live-streamed the old broadcast and we watched it together.

To my surprise it wasn’t as bad as I’d built it up to be or remembered it. It was a great reminder about the often cavernous gap between our perception of an experience versus the reality of that experience. This is something my husband and I run into when we do our podcast, Factory Settings. We both have horrible recall—and we don’t necessarily trust our memory of events in the past—so much of who we are is the story that we’ve told ourselves.

In Alcoholics Anonymous one of the most daunting tasks is completing your 4th Step. It requires going back and listing everyone person, place or thing you have a resentment for and then as my sponsor explained, “what they did or what you think they did” to earn their place on the list. Working through that step, it came to my attention that much of the resentment I was hanging on to was less about what a person or institution did to me and more about how I perceived it.

It’s taken almost ten years to be able to tease out what was true from what was false in the story that I’ve told myself and I’m still reminded almost daily that my faulty wiring or factory settings or hormones will always color my view of reality. Add to this the confirmation bias we are being fed by algorithms and the daily news cycle and things can seem much worse than they are—but like my media hit and some of my memories—it’s usually not as bad as it seems.