The Red Sweater

I have written many times about being “wrong.”

And my desire…at times…to be right.

Did you catch that sarcasm?

“At times” is ALL THE TIME.

But what is more likely, to be honest, is that I am wrong more than I am right.

Have you ever heard detectives and police officers talk about how differently witnesses can remember the exact same event?

One sees a blue car…one sees a white one.

One would guess the suspect was 6’0” tall, while another would say 6’5”.

One would say the victim had long brown hair and another would say dirty blonde.

I used to find this confusing.

How could their descriptions be so vastly different?

But have you ever tried to remember what someone was wearing who just walked by you?

You’re lucky if I even remember whether the person was male or female…much less what they wore.

I cannot tell you, as I sit here right now without looking, what underwear I have on, what earrings I am wearing, or which eyeliner I chose today.

And I have looked at myself several times today!

I painstakingly picked out my jewelry and eyeliner this morning.

And I have, ahem, seen my underwear a few times today as well.

So maybe I shouldn’t be judging the eyewitnesses.

A few weeks ago, I was watching a TikTok video of a woman recreating a Pinterest outfit she liked.

She showed the outfit at the start of the video and then started finding items in her closet to recreate it.

I watched her pull out black and white pieces and kept thinking, She needs a red sweater. The picture had a red sweater.

She kept going.

No red sweater.

Such an oversight on her part.

But then she showed a side-by-side of her outfit compared to the original.

And I’ll be damned if the original outfit did not have a lick of red in it.

Such an oversight.

On MY part.

I saw something that was NOT there.

Our brains cannot possibly pay equal attention to every piece of information around us. They select, interpret, fill in gaps, and later reconstruct memories from what they managed to hold onto.

Which means what I remember seeing and what was actually there are not always the same thing.

So when one person remembers someone as 5’11” and another swears they were 6’5”, neither person necessarily has to be lying.

They are making sense of what they saw through their own perspective.

Their experiences.

Their expectations.

Their view of the world and the people in it.

For all I know, when I saw that outfit, some unconscious part of my brain thought, That would look good with a red sweater.

And suddenly there was a red sweater.

I didn’t consciously put it there.

But there it was anyway.

Which is funny when we are talking about Pinterest outfits.

It becomes considerably less funny when we are talking about people.

Because if my brain can invent a red sweater that literally never existed…

what else has it invented?

What if the person who “ignored” me…didn’t?

What if the friend who “doesn’t care”…does?

What if the stranger who “looked at me funny”…was just squinting into the sun?

What if the email I read as criticism…wasn’t criticism at all?

Our brains are constantly filling in blanks.

Sometimes correctly.

Sometimes hilariously incorrectly.

Sometimes painfully incorrectly.

And I trust my first interpretation far more than I should.

Last week, I posted an essay about being betrayed and being the betrayer and how I would rather be the betrayed.

This led to conversations with people who said they would rather be the betrayer.

Because the betrayer holds the control.

And who wants to be the one not in control?

I could hear that and think they are wrong.

Or I could wonder what they have experienced that makes control feel more important to them than it does to me.

Because I am not coming to my conclusion objectively either.

I am looking through my lens.

A lens shaped by everything that has happened to me.

The things I regret.

The things I fear.

The things I value.

The people I have loved.

The ways I have been hurt.

The ways I have hurt other people.

And so are they.

Maybe neither of us is seeing the whole picture.

The older I get, the less interested I become in certainty.

Because certainty has embarrassed me.

I have been absolutely convinced there was a red sweater…

that never existed.

I have been convinced people meant things they never meant.

I have been convinced I remembered conversations exactly as they happened.

Only to later realize…

I remembered my version.

This is why humility matters.

Not because I should assume I am always wrong.

And not because I should distrust my own perception of the world.

But because I should stop assuming I am always right.

There is a difference between trusting what I see and believing mine is the only possible way to see it.

Every person I meet is looking at the world through a lens built over a lifetime.

Including me.

And my lens can be very wrong.

Maybe that’s why I have written so much about being right.

Because every time I become certain, life eventually hands me another invisible red sweater.

Something I would have sworn existed.

Something I would have defended.

Something that was never there at all.

Maybe being right isn’t the goal.

Maybe seeing more clearly is.