What colour is purple?

I was asked recently, by a child, what colour I saw when I saw the colour purple. There is an obvious answer to this one but it soon became clear the child was asking whether we both saw the same thing when we saw a colour known to us both as purple.

Now, sometimes, as an adult, one finds oneself going through the day ticking things off To Do Lists and responding to emails and forgetting to put the bins out and then out of nowhere one is asked to contemplate the subjectivity of ocular perception. And thank goodness for that.

Public Service Announcement: there is no central narrator. Your perspective is yours alone. Use it wisely.

Life isn’t all delightful provocations from eight-year-olds, though. I was recently having a rip snorter of an argument with someone when I realised we both thought we were looking at the same script but actually they were completely different. It was as though someone was editing what I was saying as the words were leaving my mouth. By the time they got to the other person’s ears, they had changed in ways that enraged and wounded. ‘I think you’re doing really well’, I would say. ‘I think, given your lack of ability and my superiority, you’re not doing the worst job ever,’ the other person heard. There are subtleties in human communication that each of us colours in by ourselves.

We presume so much shorthand. ‘I hated that film’ is never the full story. The reasons you had a bad experience in the film are to do with the many aspects of your own experience that make you who you are, combined with the qualities of the film. And sure, maybe the aspects that make you who you are include going to film school or something, but that doesn’t make your opinion correct. That’s what makes other people’s (clearly incorrect) opinions about things you love so infuriating. It’s why we find such joy in discovering other people whose likes and dislikes are the same as our own: oh the joy of mutual appreciation when the world around you sees it differently.

It’s difficult to imagine your way into someone else’s head. People are surprising sometimes. Friends do confusing things that seem unlike them and thus like hurtful betrayal but it shouldn’t be surprising: we aren’t each other.

The worst is when someone passes away with questions unanswered and you’re left having one half of that conversation with an imaginary extended version of the other person. But really it’s you. You’re having a conversation with a version of the person imagined by you. So really, we will never entirely be able to understand another person exactly.

I read an article recently about why people love the genre of storytelling called ‘true crime’. A psychologist was declaring that we should all have a good look at ourselves because we’re finding entertainment these hideous stories about death and murder and the basest behaviour of human beings (and often speculating about it on Reddit). Also though, the project of True Crime is one of imagining; of attempting to recreate scenarios in which we can understand behaviour we don’t understand. It’s the same with most genres of storytelling. Romance is two people discovering each other’s perceptions and what they think about the world and how those two different perceptions are compatible (usually in a small town where one of them runs a bookshop). Detective stories are about trying to imagine how people behaved in past situations and what made them think and behave the way they did. Even horror films - ‘don’t go into the forest you moron!’ - test the theory that under the most intense pressure people behave in ways they might not in the course of an everyday workday.

All of this, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, does not answer the question about the colour purple. It does help, though, sometimes, to know that you actually don’t know how other people perceive things. And that other people don’t know how you do either.

I was feeling a bit overwhelmed at work last week when someone I work with stood next to me and asked how I was. ‘You know’, I said, ‘I feel a bit… wrung out.’ She looked at me with curiosity. ‘Need a minute?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said, honestly. ‘I think I just needed to say it’. She squeezed my arm.

‘Sing it, sister’, she said.

There’a mystery in other people, but there’s comfort too.