Point of You

I found out recently that a friend’s kid misheard ‘point of view’ as ‘point of you’ and I’ve been thinking about ever since. It’s difficult to remember that you’re just a passing character in everybody else’s stories. You’re the protagonist of your own, obviously. That’s the point of you. Sometimes, though, it can be an interesting thought experiment to attempt to switch POVs with people you don’t even know.

Public Service Announcement: sometimes all you need to do is consider a different point of view.

This was all brought home to me the other day when the person in front of me in the queue at the shop looked at me and my loud, messy family and made a face that I interpreted as disapproval bordering on aggression. When someone does that, you do tend to turn back to the scene and imagine it through their eyes.

I turned back. Sure enough, there was plenty to notice. One child was picking up every item on the stand near the counter and inspecting it, singing a little song dedicated to the item (chewing gum, a Mars bar), and returning it. The other child, in bare feet and a shirt several sizes too big, was zipping and dipping and flipping and flopping about the place. I turned back to the woman. She was shaking her head. I said, ‘It’s a lot fun, going shopping as a family.’ This was meant to indicate that I was conceding her implied point of it all being a bit much, but was also a way of not blaming the kids for being, well, children. She gave me a slightly disgusted look as a sign-off and then left.

‘Imagine being the kind of person who doesn’t even need to say anything to be unpleasant’, I said to my partner later. But then I thought about it. This person didn’t say anything. I was being the protagonist (the point was me, get it?). I was casting her in the role of the extra at the supermarket who’s a bit snippy.

I put it to you, though, that her POV was probably quite different.

POV: Moira stands at the counter, listening to the teenager scanning her groceries. She’s not looking at the teenager though. Didn’t answer his initial ‘how are you today?’

It’s the children she’s watching. So much energy. Near-constant movement. Imagination, rolling discoveries. The little one in bare feet fits the sole of one foot over the curve of the trolley wheel and tests his weight against it. The other one stops singing to ask a question of her father. Something about the ingredients in the sugar-free confectionary she was singing about.

Moira can’t turn away. Her breath is suspended. Little, lively, people. Imagine. But Moira doesn’t have little lively people. Not now. It makes her sad, of course it does, it always makes her sad, but what it makes her more than sad is angry.

When the woman in the hoodie says something sarcastic about how fun it is to do things together, Moira, just for a moment, thinks she might reach out and slap the woman’s face. Oh to be so relaxed about having all that. Oh, to be so carefree as to introduce a degree of eye-rolling comradery with a perfect stranger. The teenager asks her to swipe her card and she does, leaving it all behind and wondering, not for the first time, why she puts herself through it.

Now whose side are you on?

Of course, maybe Moira never wanted kids. Maybe, though, she was fired late last week. Maybe she had to fire someone else. Maybe Moira is low in iron and has chronic pain right down the side of her body. Maybe she’s feeling stressed and annoyed because of a drug she has to take for something. She could be, in the other scenes of her life, really nice to animals, or she’s the nurse that stays late to hold the old lady’s hand until the drugs kick in, or she’s working on a cure for cancer.

Also? Maybe she’s a judgemental meanie who thinks children should be neither seen nor heard. I feel less confident about this last one though, now that I’ve had a bit of a think about it. Public Service Announcement: sometimes the point of you is less important than the point of view. Not often, but sometimes. And you never know when, so it’s sometimes good to give the benefit of the doubt.