What If We Met People Before We Met Their Reputation?
I watched Michael Beasley's interview with Shannon Sharpe recently.
I've known who Beasley is for most of my life. I grew up watching basketball, so by the time I clicked on the interview I already had some idea of him.
The talent. The second overall pick. The career people thought would go differently. The stories that followed him everywhere.
I knew all of that.
What I couldn't really tell you was when all of those separate things became an opinion of the person himself.
I don't remember deciding what I thought about Michael Beasley.
I just had a version of him in my head.
I think that's why the interview stayed with me.
At one point they talked about the time Beasley tried to check into a Lakers game wearing the wrong shorts.
I remembered that.
It was funny. It became one of those clips people passed around, another story that seemed to fit everything people already thought about him.
Then Beasley explained what was happening in his life around that time.
His mom had died. His cousin had died shortly before that game. He had been deciding whether to leave the team to attend the funeral and ultimately stayed. He didn't want to play that night, and then he walked onto the court in the wrong shorts.
I had never heard that part.
For years I knew the clip without knowing anything happening outside the frame.
I don't think learning the context means I have to completely reinterpret every opinion I ever had about him. I still don't know him. I listened to a podcast.
But I did leave it wondering how I had managed to know so little about someone while feeling like I already had a decent idea of who they were.
That thought has followed me more than anything else from the interview.
It's easy to see how this happens with famous people.
We get little pieces of their lives over years and eventually they start feeling complete.
I'm more interested in how often we probably do the same thing with regular people.
Someone tells you before you meet somebody:
He's kinda full of himself.
It's such a small sentence.
Then you meet him.
He talks about himself a little too much. Maybe he doesn't ask you many questions. Maybe he says something that could be taken a couple different ways.
And you think, yeah, I see it.
I've definitely done this before.
The weird thing is I probably walked away from some of those interactions feeling like I had formed my own opinion.
Technically I had.
But someone had already told me what to look for.
I wonder what I would've noticed without that.
Maybe I still would've thought he was full of himself.
Maybe I would've liked him.
I have no idea.
It works the other way too.
If someone I trust tells me how great a person is, I'm probably going to meet them with more patience. Something I might find annoying in someone else becomes easier to explain away.
We don't really meet people from zero as often as we think we do.
Sometimes their reputation gets there first.
There are probably people I haven't spoken to in years who still have a very specific idea of who I am.
I find that interesting because I do the exact same thing.
There are people I knew in high school who I could probably describe right now with way more confidence than I deserve to have.
I haven't spoken to some of them in almost ten years.
I have no clue what they're like now.
Maybe they haven't changed much.
Maybe everything I remember about them is still accurate.
Or maybe I'd meet them tomorrow and wonder how I ever thought I knew them.
I can't really update the version I have without meeting them again, so the old one just stays.
The same has to be true for me.
Someone knew me at seventeen.
Someone else knew me at twenty-one.
Someone knew me for six months at work.
Someone knew me during a good period of my life.
Someone else might've caught me during a terrible one.
If you asked all of them what I'm like, I doubt you'd get the same answer.
And I don't necessarily think any of them would be wrong.
That was the person they knew.
That's something I don't think I appreciated when I was younger.
We talk about knowing someone like there's one person sitting underneath everything and eventually, if you spend enough time around them, you figure them out.
I'm not sure it works like that.
You know someone in a certain place.
At a certain age.
Around certain people.
While certain things are happening in their life.
You get a window.
Sometimes a very big one.
Still a window.
I think labels make that window feel bigger than it actually is.
Someone is difficult.
Someone is selfish.
Someone is unreliable.
Someone is kind.
Someone is disciplined.
Someone is generous.
Once you have the word, a lot of what comes afterward becomes easier to explain.
If I already think you're selfish and you do something selfish, there isn't much left for me to wonder about.
That's just how he is.
Maybe it is.
There are people whose reputations are completely deserved.
There are people I was warned about and later understood exactly why.
I don't think every bad impression is secretly a misunderstanding and I definitely don't think knowing someone's circumstances means pretending their actions didn't matter.
Sometimes people just do shitty things.
What I've been questioning is how quickly we go from knowing what someone did to deciding we know what kind of person would do it.
That distance can be pretty big.
We cross it really fast.
I've thought about this from the other side too.
There's something uncomfortable about knowing that old versions of you continue existing in places you don't.
You can change your mind.
Grow up.
Become more patient.
Become more confident.
Get closer to your faith.
Lose parts of yourself.
Find other parts.
None of that automatically updates the person who hasn't spoken to you in five years.
You can't go around issuing software updates to everyone you've ever known.
Somebody's last experience of you is just their last experience of you.
I used to be more bothered by that.
I probably still am to some extent.
There's a natural urge to want people to have the right version of you. Especially people who mattered at some point.
But what would you even do about it?
You don't get to follow your name into every room.
You don't know how people describe you when you aren't there.
You don't know which mistake somebody remembers or which good thing they completely forgot.
There are versions of you that you have absolutely no control over.
I think you eventually have to be okay with that.
Social media makes the whole thing even stranger.
You can know an absurd amount about somebody you barely know.
Where they work.
Where they went last summer.
Who they spend time with.
What they read.
What they believe.
You can scroll far enough and find out what they believed five years ago too.
It gives you this strange sense of familiarity.
Then you actually spend time with someone and realize how little any of that tells you about what it feels like to know them.
I don't think more information necessarily means more understanding.
Sometimes it might just give us more material to build the version we already expected to find.
By the end of the Beasley interview, I knew more about his life than I did when I started it.
Somehow I was less sure of my read on him.
I've been thinking about why that felt important.
The people I know really well are actually the people I have the hardest time describing simply.
My closest friends contradict themselves.
I do too.
Someone can be incredibly generous and still disappoint you.
Someone can be difficult to deal with and still show up for you in a way nobody else does.
Someone can make a decision I think is completely wrong and still be someone I respect.
The closer you get to people, the more annoying they become to summarize.
There's always an also.
Maybe that's what was missing from the version of Beasley I had in my head.
There wasn't much room for an also.
There was just a collection of things I knew about him that had slowly started feeling like I knew him.
I'm obviously still going to form opinions about people.
I think we have to.
There are people I trust and people I don't. There are people I want close to me and people I'd rather keep my distance from.
I don't think the answer is pretending we can go through life without making those calls.
I just wonder about the certainty sometimes.
How much did I actually see?
How much was I told?
How old is the version of this person I'm still carrying?
Would I have interpreted the same thing differently if nobody had given me an explanation beforehand?
I probably won't know most of the time.
I think I'm becoming more comfortable with that answer.
There are people I know.
There are people I know things about.
And there are people I've heard enough about that I've accidentally confused the two.
I started that interview thinking I knew Michael Beasley.
I finished it realizing I mostly knew the version of him I'd been given over the years.
I still don't know him.
If anything, hearing more of his story made that clearer.
Maybe people are supposed to get harder to summarize the closer you look.