Misunderstood, Profound
I can’t take credit for this, but I still think it’s great:
You’re never what you think you are, man. At least not to other people. We expound endless amounts of energy trying to be this or be that — whatever it is we think has value to the outside world — and for what? In the end, we are either misunderstood or misinterpreted or misguided or all of the above. And no one really gives a damn about who they’ve misunderstood because they’re too busy worrying about how the rest of the world misunderstands them. So we’re all just one big mass of misunderstandings who individually think they’re the first and the last person to ever be misunderstood. And that’s the real tragedy – not that we have been misunderstood, but that, in our desperate effort to be understood, we perpetuate the misunderstanding of others.
The backstory… from Kristina Graham Schlup:
I used to sit down at the old Coffee Haus in downtown Fort Worth and talk with this homeless guy, Harry. On a good day, Harry would tell you he had a PhD in English and Philosophy and we often had the most interesting conversations that seemed to support his claims. (On a bad day, Harry didn’t speak coherently and he appeared withdrawn and disinterested.) Sometimes, in a small journal I used to carry around with me, I would scribble down notes — I recently re-discovered this journal the other day and the following comes from one of my entries. Apparently, I once bought Harry a coffee and a bagel and we discussed what he considered to be the fundamental problem with most of humanity. His spool of wisdom was threaded something like this: [see above]