How I Perceive Things

Today I want to talk about perception.

"I realize so many things are actually affected by my own perception."

Perception in Relationships

I barely talk about my romance stories here partly because when it comes to romantic relationships I think I need more lessons to be learned and most of the romance stories are ... not doing so well.

But here are lessons I learn through my attempts in this field that I am still learning about. For me because this includes communication and a partner, I guess there are no clear rules when it comes to communication and a partner. So how I should react and adjust myself is really dependent on how I perceive it.

There is a case where I thought this girl liked my jokes from how she responded and how I perceived the response until I found out later that she was actually just being polite and actually did not really like it.

And there is also the case where I thought I bothered this girl. It came from a perception that I got from the dry response and how slow she responded. Later I found out that she is not bothered. She just doesn't like to talk too much but she never meant it the way I perceived it.

And because I read the interaction wrong, it affects how I respond to it. Like when I thought that I was bothering that girl I would react accordingly by like stopping regularly sending her memes and jokes that came from me daydreaming.

Which later made the result ... yeah become another sad ending for me.

Perception on the Work Results

In another case, how I perceive something when I am working on something makes a huge difference to the end result.

I learn that if I have good perception of something like

"this is fun", "I like this", "I think I can finish it easily"

this will give a better result rather than

"this is boring", "this is stuff I hate", "I think I can't finish this because it's hard".

One case example for this statement is when I did write code back when I was an intern. I got a perception that it was a hard task to make adjustments on an old codebase that no one touched for years, and under that pressure the result did not go as I was planning. There were several cases that were not handled well, causing bugs on the app.

But lately I got the chance to make adjustments on that same codebase again, but now with confidence and a different perception about the codebase, I could give a better result this time and I even found a bug that was not noticed before and fixed it too.

From that I learned that how I perceive something affects how I work with it and eventually it affects the final result, so I try to give good perception to my work to make it more enjoyable and give a better result.

Perception on Who I Think I Am

And another realization is that perception of my identity could also affect something in my life. The idea is how I act will likely be based on how I perceive my own identity.

I just realized it when I rethought my own limitation.

I thought that I was actually not that addicted to cigarettes. The behavior is enforced by how I perceive my identity which says "I am the man who smokes cigarettes to deal with everyday problems". But then after I realized even back then I could solve these kinds of problems without it and created a new identity that says "I am the man who could deal with everyday problems by myself", it helped me reduce my cigarette intake.

And this does not only happen in that case. The moment I perceive that I could do things that I thought were not me, I actually could do it.

Like for example exercising, learning code in another language, talking to strangers, being at social events, and other things that I perceived were never me and that who I am will never make happen.

That's how I see perception today. And I might perceive it differently tomorrow, who knows.