The Art of Seeing Someone

Recently, I was helping Amy get ready for an audition, putting a little makeup on her. She giggled and asked me: “Are you enjoying yourself, Danielle?” Confused, I said, “Yeah? Sure? Why?” And she told me I was grinning from ear to ear. I had no idea my face was doing that. 

My expression of joy in that moment, genuine and unconscious, was sparked by the magic of relationship: her seeing me see her.

I’m not a huge makeup person, and go without it most days. But putting it on someone else is a different kind of creative joy: it’s a way to show her not just that I love her, but some of how I love her. With a sweep of color or a dash of highlighter, I can highlight the things about her I think are prettiest, or strongest, or most expressive.

I love it for the same reason I love helping kids articulate themselves in their college essays. Highschoolers are trying to figure out who they are and how they got that way. Taking time to study them, to ask them questions and share what I’m hearing them say, is always tremendously empowering; I see kids come alive, open up, blossom from anxious about others’ expectations to sure they have something unique to say. There’s something magic about reflecting back someone to themselves—helping someone know that they’re seen, and delighted in sets them free.

But it sets us free as well.

I genuinely think paying attention to someone is the most fun thing I can do. Every Christmas season, I sit around Bryant Park for hours and watch people ice skate and shop with dates or family members. I gain favorites: this girl who won’t stop tucking her curly hair behind her hair when the guy she’s with reaches towards her hand, or this kid who keeps trying to let go of his penguin-prop too soon.

I like to notice how their cheeks move a little asymmetrically, when a person furrows their brows, what they find funny, what they reverently touch with just fingertips. For everyone, those things are different. It’s endlessly interesting.

Someone pointed out to me once the irony of how people think they need to get away from people to a sunset on a mountaintop or private beach to see God’s face; Biblically, it is other humans that bear God’s image with special significance.

What could beat beholding each other? 

There comes a point, when you’re drinking in someone else, where you settle in and lose yourself in them. I call it “self-forgetfulness.” Finally, you are free: wondering about another person without worrying about what they think of you. It takes practice, and I’ve learned a lot of people stay in first-person narration in their own brains all the time, and they worry if their laugh was too loud or if they said the right thing or if they’re slouching or if the person really likes them.

It’s one of the things I think is so powerful about fiction; it draws you out of your own mind and into the interior world of another. I think drinking in stories is a way of practicing that discipline, and perhaps why it feels easier for me to lose myself than many of my friends. I have to lose myself in foreign worlds all the time, of my own creation or someone else’s; I have to lose myself in their thoughts, smells, and experiences and value them according to how they want to be valued.

It’s counter-intuitive in some ways: self-care doesn’t necessarily involve focusing on yourself. For me, self-care is mostly about carving out space for self-forgetfulness, and often, that serves the people I’m seeing as well.

What is the last time you felt truly seen? What is the last time you lost yourself in someone else?

What person or story could you lose yourself in this weekend?