It might sound like a line from a poem a creeper would write before sneaking into your house to smell your sheets, but it is more rooted in the ideas of Jacques Derrida than Jeffery Dahmer. The more I drift through life the more convinced I become that the way I experience life is unique to me just as the way each individual experiences life is unique to them. In that sense we are not living in a shared reality but are merely sharing an understanding of the signposts of that reality. This is true on many different levels–from the way we see and feel physical items all the way to the more interpretive emotional states that exist within ourselves and between people.
Though we may chose to abide by a shared set of morals and principles, how we see those things and how we see the action of one another are completely individual perceptions. Once the doors close and we are tucked away from the world we are left to ponder the easy ideas of ‘what does it mean to me?’ For example: When I heard about the Sandy Hook shooting, my reaction was to wonder about the kids and their families. For others it was a call to anger, a fight about gun control. To others it was a conspiracy that needed to be outed.
We view people differently. We measure life differently, and wealth differently. We can look at the same night sky and come up with a billion different interpretations. We can read the same book and love it or hate it depending on who we are and where we come from. I believe the world is a singular organism and each of us are its eyes through which it sees 6 billion different worlds, and six billion different night skies, and 6 billion divergent lives. Each of us is living just one.