“Perspective Is Reality.” No, the Fuck It Isn’t.

A therapist once told me:

“Perspective is reality.”

I hated that sentence immediately.

Not because I don’t think perspective matters.

Of course it matters.

Two people can experience the exact same conversation and walk away remembering it completely differently.

We interpret things.

We make assumptions.

We fill in blanks.

We drag every relationship, childhood experience, insecurity, expectation, fear, and previous heartbreak we’ve ever had into whatever is happening in front of us.

Nobody experiences life objectively.

I understand that.

But perspective is not reality.

Perspective is perspective.

And sometimes there are things that actually fucking happened.

The conversation came during therapy while I was talking about a relationship.

There had been things happening behind my back between my partner and another person.

I believed boundaries had been crossed.

More importantly, some of what was happening had been deliberately kept from me.

Eventually I found out.

And I was pissed.

Really pissed.

I reacted.

One of the things I did was privately send what I knew to someone connected to the situation who had authority over part of it.

My therapist didn’t agree with that decision.

Fair enough.

Looking back, I’m not even sure I completely agree with that decision.

Was I trying to expose something I thought was wrong?

Yes.

Was I angry?

Absolutely.

Did some part of me want there to be consequences?

Probably.

That’s considerably less comfortable to admit.

But it’s true.

And somewhere in that conversation she said:

“Perspective is reality.”

That’s where she lost me.

Because my reaction didn’t create what happened before it.

That’s the distinction I couldn’t get past.

I might have interpreted some things incorrectly.

I might have assigned motives that weren’t there.

I might have been angrier than the situation required.

I might have responded badly.

All of those things are possible.

But none of them travel backward through time and erase somebody else’s decisions.

Something happened.

Then I learned about it.

Then I interpreted it.

Then I reacted.

Those are different fucking things.

And if we’re going to talk about accountability, I think the order matters.

This is where intent gets complicated.

Because one of the things that bothered me most wasn’t just what happened.

It was that it was hidden.

And my immediate thought was:

If you weren’t doing anything wrong, why hide it?

That still feels like a reasonable question.

But even that question can become a trap.

Because hiding something tells me something.

It tells me you didn’t want me to know.

It tells me you believed disclosure might create a problem.

What it doesn’t necessarily tell me is exactly why.

Maybe you knew you were crossing a boundary.

Maybe you thought I would overreact.

Maybe you were avoiding an argument.

Maybe you were confused about what you were doing yourself.

Maybe your intentions were worse than I thought.

Maybe they were considerably less sinister.

I don’t know.

That’s an important distinction.

I may not know exactly why you hid it. But I know you hid it. Those aren’t the same claim.

One is a fact about behavior.

The other is my interpretation of intent.

Those shouldn’t be confused.

And this is where my therapist’s point becomes more interesting than I wanted it to be.

Because while I still don’t believe perspective is reality, perspective absolutely affects the reality we experience.

I saw what happened through my own history.

My own fears.

My own expectations about relationships.

My own understanding of loyalty.

My own definition of what counts as crossing a line.

Someone else might have looked at the same facts and interpreted them differently.

That matters.

But it doesn’t mean every interpretation is equally supported by what happened.

That’s where this shit gets difficult.

There are facts.

There are interpretations of those facts.

There are intentions behind actions.

There are consequences from those actions.

And then there are the stories everybody tells afterward.

We tend to throw all of those things into one giant emotional blender and call the result truth.

I’m not sure that’s useful.

Here’s the part where this gets inconvenient for me.

I can’t spend an entire essay arguing that someone else’s intentions don’t erase their choices…

and then use my intentions to erase mine.

That’s bullshit.

Maybe I felt betrayed.

Maybe I believed something inappropriate had happened.

Maybe I believed I was exposing behavior that deserved consequences.

Maybe I thought I was defending myself.

Maybe I was hurt.

Maybe I was furious.

Fine.

I still made the decision I made.

Nobody forced me to send anything.

Nobody grabbed my phone.

Nobody dictated the message.

Nobody hit send except me.

I own that.

I can explain why I did it.

I can even believe some of my reasons were justified.

But explanation and accountability aren’t mutually exclusive.

That’s something I’m slowly learning.

I think we do something strange when relationships go bad.

We start looking for the defendant.

Who caused this?

Who was toxic?

Who betrayed whom?

Who started it?

Who needs to apologize?

Who needs therapy?

Who is the narcissist?

Who is avoidant?

Who is the asshole?

Sometimes those questions have obvious answers.

Abuse exists.

Deception exists.

Manipulation exists.

There are situations where responsibility is overwhelmingly one-sided.

But a lot of ordinary relationship disasters aren’t that clean.

Two people can contribute to a dynamic without contributing equally.

Someone can do something wrong to you…

and you can respond badly.

Both things can be true.

Their behavior doesn’t automatically justify yours.

Your reaction doesn’t retroactively justify theirs.

Accountability isn’t a fucking relay race.

One person doesn’t hand responsibility to the other and walk away.

That’s the part I wish we were better at.

Saying:

You did that.

I did this.

And refusing to turn either statement into an excuse for the other.

Because I’ve done the opposite.

I’ve spent enormous amounts of mental energy constructing arguments about why something I did made sense because of what somebody else did first.

And maybe it did make sense.

That’s not the same as saying it was the right thing to do.

Those are different questions.

I can understand myself without acquitting myself.

I can understand somebody else without acquitting them either.

That’s a much less satisfying way to think.

There isn’t a villain.

There isn’t necessarily a hero.

Nobody gets the dramatic courtroom moment where the jury announces who ruined everything.

You just get a bunch of human beings carrying their own shit into a situation and occasionally making a spectacular fucking mess.

Maybe that’s what bothered me about:

“Perspective is reality.”

It sounded too complete.

Too clean.

Like reality simply bends itself around whatever each person believes happened.

I don’t buy that.

If I lie to you, I lied to you.

My perspective might explain why.

Your perspective might determine what the lie means to you.

My intentions might change how harshly you judge it.

Context might make it understandable.

But somewhere underneath all of that…

I still lied.

Facts matter.

Behavior matters.

Intent matters.

Perspective matters.

Context matters.

Consequences matter.

They just aren’t the same thing.

And maybe my therapist wasn’t actually saying they were.

Maybe I heard the sentence more literally than she intended.

That’s possible too.

Which would be fucking hilarious, considering the subject.

Maybe what she meant was that our perspective becomes the reality we experience.

That makes considerably more sense to me.

Because we don’t respond directly to reality.

We respond to what we believe reality means.

Someone doesn’t text back.

Fact.

You decide they’re losing interest.

Interpretation.

You feel rejected.

Experience.

You send some irritated message.

Reaction.

They were asleep.

Well…

fuck.

Perspective mattered enormously.

It just wasn’t reality.

The older I get, the less interested I am in figuring out who was completely right.

Including me.

Especially me.

I’m more interested in separating the pieces.

What actually happened?

What did I assume?

What did I know?

What did I think I knew?

What was intentionally hidden?

What did I assign intent to without actually knowing?

What did the other person do?

What did I do afterward?

Which parts belong to me?

Which parts don’t?

That’s harder than declaring somebody the asshole.

But it’s probably more useful.

There are still things from that relationship I believe were wrong.

Therapy hasn’t changed that.

Reading about attachment hasn’t changed that.

Self-reflection hasn’t changed that.

And examining my own behavior doesn’t require me to pretend those things were okay.

That’s important to me.

Because sometimes self-awareness gets twisted into another strange form of self-blame.

If I can just understand my childhood enough…

understand my attachment enough…

understand my triggers enough…

then maybe everything that happened becomes somehow my responsibility.

No.

Fuck that.

Self-reflection shouldn’t mean absorbing everybody else’s accountability.

It should mean getting clearer about your own.

Own what’s yours.

Refuse what’s theirs.

And be fucking honest about the difference.

That’s harder than it sounds.

Because sometimes I desperately want something to belong entirely to somebody else.

And sometimes I’d probably prefer to believe something was entirely my fault rather than accept that I never had control over it in the first place.

Neither one makes it true.

So is perspective reality?

I still don’t think so.

Perspective is the lens.

Reality is whatever the hell is on the other side of it.

The problem is none of us ever gets to take the lens completely off.

Maybe the best we can do is occasionally notice that we’re wearing one.

Ask what it’s distorting.

Ask what it’s revealing.

Look at the actual behavior.

Question the story we’ve built around it.

And then turn the fucking thing around and point it at ourselves.

I know what some other people did.

I know what I did.

I have theories about why they did what they did.

I have theories about why I did what I did.

Some of those theories are probably right.

Some are probably bullshit.

And some questions I’m probably never going to answer.

Which brings us back to the same inconvenient place.

I don’t fucking know.

— Just James