LΞO

I'll try to tell this story without spoiling the You Can See Everything movie... In the 6th grade, I was handed a script to perform for speech and debate. It was Abbot and Costello's "Who's on first." I won several medals by this point for prose, oratory and debate, but never for comedy. I read the script and couldn't understand it. I didn't laugh or find it funny at all. My teacher assigned a classmate to Abbot and I was Costello. Failing to understand it, he had the whole class watch it and I felt like an alien watching everyone around me laugh while I did not get the joke. Given everyone was laughing, and I wasn't, I withdrew confused. This would become a recurring theme in my life .. even today, though I've done so much work on theory of mind over the years that I get a lot more things. I ended up performing the role masked, not knowing even what "on first" meant, as I didn't even understand baseball. I imitated the actors and delivered it perfectly and was perplexed at how I could win and make people laugh without understanding why. When I saw this mentioned in the film, I cried a little. The little me felt seen. We walk around this world thinking that everyone thinks the way you do. They don't. Regardless of what you think of this movie or @ElizabethHolmes, I hope you walk away with a new understanding of how what you watch has a spin, that not everyone experiences reality the same way and have more compassion in your heart for others around you.