Perception is a tricky S.O.B.

Oh that dress.  You know which one I'm talking about.  The one that is so obviously gold and white.

I first saw the dress whilst sitting in a cabin in the lovely Smoky Mountains with my friends. 

Look at them! Aren't they beautiful?!

Two of us first saw the picture and could not understand the big deal , the dress is white and gold, why the uproar?  When we showed the picture to the others, two of them immediately said black and blue.  What?!?! We all then proceeded to freak out about this and call each other liars for the next 45 minutes.

It's blows my mind how someone can look at a picture and see one thing while someone else can look at the same picture and see something completely different!How is that possible?

I realize the dress thing is explained by science (and that's all I really understand about it because you know...science), but it really got me to thinking about everyday life perception.  What else are we seeing/not-seeing on a daily basis? What are we interpreting one way that someone else is interpreting a completely different way?  What have I been missing the last 33 years?

How often do we find ourselves hurt or mad about something someone said or did, and yet that person cannot fathom why we would be mad?  It seems that most problems arise because something was interpreted in the opposite way it was meant to be interpreted.  Other times people are just dicks and do mean things.  But I digress.

A friend recently told me she does not eat at the lunch table at work because it is crowded and she would rather everyone get a seat first and if there is one left available for her, great.  If not, no biggie, and she'll eat in her office.  However, her co-workers took it as she never eats with them, so she must not like them. She was seeing white and gold... everyone else was seeing black and blue.

I find that my feelings are hurt often by others, and not because they are doing malicious things to me on purpose (or are they???), I'm just perceiving their actions in the complete wrong way. Most of the time I even know I'm taking it the wrong way, but what about the times I don't recognize this? 

I cannot count how many times Cheyenne and I have misinterpreted each other.  About a year ago I "liked" an article on Facebook that was written by a blogger I love.  She had gone through some marriage problems and wrote about how they were getting over their problems and making good progress.  I was happy to read that, so I "liked" the article.  Cheyenne logged on later and saw that I had "liked" the article (because Facebook is a stalker) and saw that the article was about marriage problems.  He thought I "liked" it because I thought we had marriage problems.  He began to wonder what I thought was wrong in our marriage and are we ok? All from a Facebook "like"!  Perception can be a nasty S.O.B. sometimes (as can Facebook).

So instead of us all getting our panties in a wad about #TheDress and what color it is or is not, maybe we all need to take a lesson from it and try to see things a little more black and blue in our lives (because the dress is  so obviously white and gold).  Maybe we need to asses our own actions and words and see if we're projecting black and blue instead of the white and gold we intended.

Who knew the dress was so deep?

(and yes, I know the real dress is black and blue.  Whatever)