Dashed

Isn't it interesting when we dash our preconceptions of each other? For better or worse is irrelevant - I think either way, it's empowering. In other words, if you thought someone was strong or raw, this was your first take on them, then you realize later after talking to them more in a less organized setting, that their chains run just as long and thick as yours. Suddenly you feel less envious - but it could work the other way too, if you pitied someone, thought you had it on them, you were freer, less inhibited, in greater control of yourself (perhaps a key contradiction right there), only to find out that that person lives in a way that is surprisingly cool, they navigate their element with much more fluidity then you had first proposed. Perhaps their freedom, now, detracts from your own the same way the previous person gave you a little back, made you feel lucky. I think it's something we're all doing all the time, measuring ourselves against each other, and to deny ourselves indulgence in those preconceptions - calling them what they are - is when we get in trouble, and discriminations form, racism bubbles out of a false pretense of truth. When another person outsizes your assessment of them, whatever that assessment was and however it makes you feel now (all of our different levels of insecurity and appeals against them), it's humbling, and to quote a Brett Dennen song "the failure keeps us humble, and leads us closer to peace."