Why are you looking at me like that?

     I just finished watching A Streetcar Named Desire. It's about a paranoid woman named Blanche who crashes at her sister's place and tells a heap of lies to everyone around her in order to get their sympathy.

    One thing that struck me was, in the midst of the stories she would tell people, when she wouldn't get the affection and validation she was wanting, she would look up at the faces of those around her and notice discord on them. She would then ask with some vexation, "Why are you looking at me like that?"

    I know that interaction. I've been in Blanche's shoes many times. I have told stories that I believed were true but weren't. Then I've looked up at the faces of those I was speaking to and wondered why people were giving me such strange looks.

    But there is one difference. Recently, when I look at those faces, and I want to know what it is they are thinking, I find that I really do want to know and I'm not just mad that I didn't get the validation I wanted. They seem to know something I don't, even if they don't articulate it. And the thing that keeps me from asking them what they think is my fear that they won't be truthful in response.

    I find it so difficult to discern whether someone is lying or telling me the truth. It takes so much time because I normally don't trust my initial intuition but have to verify by cross-referencing different actions that person take over time. Pretty much everyone is a liar - but not about everything. The tricky work is to tell when someone is lying and when they are not.

    If I asked someone point blank, "Why are you looking at me like that? What do you see that is wrong with me?" a loving person might actually tell me the truth. But an unloving person would believe that it would be better to keep me locked in my universe of lies.