Past and Present

People have lives.  This is a very simple and obvious statement to make, but it's something we easily forget.  When we walk down the street and pass by so many faces of people we don't know, we tend not to dwell on them.  The same is true for the people who we actually know who they are, whether intimately or simply being aware of them through the cultural Zeitgeist.  We forget these people have lives, entire stories from birth up until that moment of which we often know very little, if anything at all.

When you see someone appear on television, it's easy to think of other shows and movies they have appeared in, but if you take any given actor or actress and Google their name and view their IMDB article, or read their Wikipedia page, there is a wealth of acting credits to begin with, and much more beyond, that we know nothing about.  Even big names that we associate with headlines and big A* productions, we often forget there was a time when they weren't famous.  You can pick the most famous person you can think of, and still, there is a life story behind them where they have gone the distance before they became famous. 

A little closer to home, we can have friends who we are close to, people that we know intimately, and even then there is the realisation that even with them, you can't spend every waking minute with them, and unless you grew up in the same house, there's an entire life of which you were never a part.  I'm 30 years old now, and there are people that I have known only a few years, and there are people I have known for so long that I don't recall ever "meeting" them, they were just always there.  No matter how close, nor how long we have known each other, there is still more to know, there is still a life lived, and lessons learned, and thoughts and dreams that may have been forgotten or simply abandoned, neither of which we have ever spoken of, since it has simply never come up in conversation.

When I was younger, when I got to know people, the first few months would be rather intense, as we shared more and more about each other, in essence we shared our life stories.  As I have grown, I have realised this is something that you can only really do when you are young, and even at that, some people live lives that are so tumultuous or so hectic that it becomes impractical even at a young age to share "all of it" with one another.  Instead as I have grown I've come to realise that most people don't want to know your life story anyway, all they want to know is who you are, and where you are going.  The past will come up in conversation when and where, but is not something you dive into.

The question is, how do you decide what is relevant and what is not?  How do you decide what other people need to know, if anything at all?  There are times, such as moments of trauma that it becomes important to have conversations about such topics, as understanding what happened can explain a lot about your behaviour and why you act the way you do - but even at that I feel there is a danger that if those conversations and reliving those memories become a matter of routine when meeting new people, the act of meeting new people in and of itself can turn into something traumatic.  Through this I believe social anxiety can develop, not because of any expectation that new people will ruin your life, but rather that in meeting someone new you will have to go through yet again the emotionally draining process of reliving your past.  That the more people you meet, the more you relive your past, over and over, until you reach a point where you don't want to do it anymore so you avoid meeting new people.