All those lit rooms
Look at an apartment building after dark. The windows are little arrangements of light, some warm, some almost blue, some already empty. A curtain moves. A television makes a room change color. Someone crosses a space and disappears. From the street, a whole life can look like a few seconds of movement inside a rectangle. It is strange how much I can imagine from so little, and how quickly I forget that I am imagining.
A profile is a window like that. A photograph, a sentence, a few things someone has made. Enough light to suggest a person. Not enough to contain one. I know this when I am choosing what to show. I understand how much is left outside the frame. But when I look at somebody else, I can become very careless with the difference between what I can see and what there is.
They look certain. They look busy in a meaningful way. Their interests seem to form a clean line from who they were to who they are becoming. Mine feel like rooms I keep walking between, forgetting why I came into each one. Perhaps theirs feel that way too. The window does not say. I fill the silence with an answer that is usually unkind to me.
The person who fits
There is a useful version of myself that is easy to describe. A list of subjects, a list of tools, a few projects with understandable purposes. I do not dislike that person. I worked to become him. But I notice how tempting it is to let the description start making decisions. An interest arrives and I ask whether it fits. A thought becomes complicated and I wonder how it would look from the street.
At that point the profile has become less like a record and more like a small authority. It tells me which curiosities look consistent. It rewards the version of me that can be understood quickly. I begin to remove the parts that need a longer conversation, not because they are false, but because they are inconvenient to display.
There is an irony in putting this thought on a website. This is also a window. These words have been chosen, arranged, made presentable. Even an admission of uncertainty can become a performance of being the kind of person who admits uncertainty. I cannot escape that by announcing that I see it. Awareness is not a door out of the room.
Leaving the curtains open
Still, I do not think the answer is to disappear. There is something generous about making a thing and letting other people find it. A piece of writing can reach someone at the right moment. A project can become the beginning of a conversation. The window is not the enemy. The trouble begins when I start treating the window as the whole house.
I want to be seen, but I do not want to become only what can be displayed. I want to keep some freedom to be inconsistent, to care about something that has no obvious connection to what I cared about yesterday. A person is allowed to have rooms that do not match. Perhaps a life becomes more interesting when the hallway between them is not immediately clear.
And I want to offer that same space to the people I look at. The confident photograph does not tell me how their morning felt. The beautiful project does not tell me what it cost them to finish it. I can admire the light without inventing the entire room. I can let another person remain larger than the evidence I have.
The building is still there. The windows are still bright. Somewhere behind one of them, someone is probably looking out, making a small, incomplete story about the people below. We keep doing this to each other. I suppose I only want to remember, a little more often, that there is a person on the other side of the glass.