I’ve been compiling a list of the moments in my life when I experienced what I’d call a personal paradigm shift.
One of the earliest entries on the list happened in grade school. A classmate made a slapstick show of being unable to pick up his eraser: it somehow jumped from his hand to the floor, then across the table, then across the room. As he fumbled after it, the three of us sharing his table were overcome with laughter. After we’d collected ourselves (and the rogue eraser) one of the other kids turned to me and said, “Wow, I didn’t know you laughed”.
I remember being astonished- I laughed all the time! How could someone be so wrong about me? Then I realized that these kids only saw me at school, where I was a classic early-stage nerd: shy, studious and rule-abiding. Thus: rarely laughing. In that moment, I first grasped at the idea that other people have their own versions of the world inside their heads, grown from their experiences. They wouldn’t know who I was unless I showed them.
Several years later, I realized that other kids had their own versions of imagined worlds as well. My friend and I were drawing together and she asked if her pencil crayon the right colour for her character’s skin. The character was from a world I’d invented (an elf trying to take down the oppressive ruling class of goose-riding witches, if I recall correctly) but my friend always played him in our make believe games and his voice was definitely more hers than mine.
Still, it hadn’t occurred to me that this fantasy elf would have a skin colour like my friend’s rather than like mine. In fact, until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me that we imagined the world differently. I saw that the cast members of all my beloved fantasy worlds, the Hermiones and the Keladrys, might look different filtered through other people’s minds.
As a teen, late night wandering of the internet brought me to some pro-life forums. They were full of activists with opinions in much the same flavour as my own, peppered with statistics, appeals to human rights and a sense of frustration with a mainstream unwilling to face the world’s real problems.
At the time, I believed that many of the world’s problems were all a big misunderstanding. I thought that a wave of mutual understanding swept across the planet would somehow transmute everyone’s political opinions to be like mine1. I had to reconsider this belief upon seeing people who had thought just as— if not more— deeply about an issue and arrived on the opposite side of the debate. Even with the same exact evidence in front of us, the world inside their heads might be founded on such different axiomatic assumptions that we’d still disagree.
There are many more moments in my list, but they all seem like the same realization on different scales: the world as I see it is less universal than I thought.
I’m curious about the scale of realizations yet to come, though I’m not exactly sure how to go hunting for them. Scanning my memory for new list entries, I usually try to hone in on a feeling of mental pressure, of bewilderment giving way to a realization that nothing in my model of the world that explains what is in front of me. This seems to happen most often when I listen closely to other people and hear the way their minds are different from my own. If you’d like to share how your paradigm shifts differ from mine, I’m all ears.
This is a apparently a common enough liberal fallacy that it has a Stuff White People Like entry. ↩︎
If this were a cinematic moment, there would be a scene where the wind blows the weathervane round to signify a huge change in direction. Do you feel it, too? Ever since February (well, for me Imbolc, but for some friends a bit later on) it feels as if the huge ‘stuckness’ of 2018 was unclogged.Whoosh! And that whoosh! is the wind shifting the weathervane round.
