(Mis)perceptions

December 18, 2021 | By Serena Puang DC ‘22+1

image description: an empty coffee cup and a woman’s hand as she writes in a notebook

The seat you choose on the first day in journalism class has a major impact on how the next month in the class is going to go. The first assignment is always to write a 2000-word profile of the person who sits beside you during the first class, and you have to talk to at least 15 people in their life to understand what makes them tick. 

I only knew one person in my class (a friend of a friend who I had taken another class with two and a half years ago). But I did know something about all of us: we’re all Yale students who are interested in journalism. Which means that, for the purposes of this assignment, our achievements, career trajectories, and potential for future success are all roughly similar and uninteresting.

If this sounds like a fun assignment, it can be. But to me, it was anxiety inducing. It felt like a more intense version of that moment when you meet someone new and they ask what ‘your thing’ is on campus or when you’re in a new class and you have to tell a group of strangers a little about yourself. I always manage to cobble something together, but there’s a small moment of panic in which I feel like I’ve forgotten everything I’ve ever done. 

The assignment in journalism class is to learn about how you're perceived: by yourself, by those around you, and by your profiler. Among other things, it’s supposed to teach you what it feels like to be on the other end of journalism and what it looks like to trust someone else with your story.

As a journalist, I think about this perception game a lot. As Stephen M.R. Covey once wrote, “We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behaviour.” Journalists ask people about their intentions and often juxtapose them with their actions, but in a single, or even several, conversations, it’s impossible to get at the complexities of a person absolutely right.

I spoke to 15 people in the process of reporting my piece, and I heard the same stories from multiple perspectives. I talked to my subject’s mom, high school friends, current friend group/housemates, and even some people who she did a summer program with years ago. I haven’t even done that with many of my closest friends. Some people were more forthcoming than others, but overall, I was grateful for how much people were willing to share with me, how much they saw in this stranger I was writing about, and how their reflections shaped the picture I painted of her. 

But I still got things wrong despite my best intentions. We all did. People misremember and misperceive. We make assumptions about others, reading meaning into things they might not intend or missing their meaning altogether. These misperceptions bother me, not only because I want to get it right but because I worry about the way that I’m perceived. 

As a Christian, I want to believe that my identity is in Christ — an identity that doesn’t change based on what I do but is solely contingent on what Jesus already did for me. And cognitively, I do believe that. But in the face of the visceral hurt associated with being misunderstood, verses like Colossians 3:1-4 about our new life in Christ and their calls to set our minds “not on earthly things” sometimes feel like an obligation instead of security.  In worrying about how others (mis)perceive me, I am still so far from the person I want to be. 

In pondering these questions, it’s easy to think about myself and the ways I am misunderstood; but recently, I’ve been reflecting on the ways that I misunderstand God. When things are going badly, it’s easy for me to wonder what the heck God is even doing and to doubt His goodness. Sometimes, I assume negative intent, like He’s purposely messing with me or putting the things I want just out of reach. 

But I’m forgetting that He knows what it feels like to be misunderstood in the deepest way: by his friends, family, and strangers. From the beginning of time, Jesus was perfectly understood by the other members of the Trinity and the heavenly beings, but not so much when He came to earth. People didn’t recognize him as God or Messiah, and they assumed bad things about him. At one point, some even speculated that his miracles were because he was working with demons (Matthew 12: 22-32).

That juxtaposition between being fully known by God and then woefully misunderstood by those closest to you is something I hadn’t thought about before having to profile someone. And in light of this, it’s comforting to know that even when I misperceive God, He perceives me perfectly. He sees the good and the bad in all of its complexity and chooses to love anyway.