Perception

I was eight years old when my first best friend died in a motorbike accident.

One day her space beside was always occupied, the next day our Ustadh announced she was gone. I remember staring at the empty space, waiting for some enormous feeling to arrive and tell me what death meant. It never came through. I didn't cry. I didn't understand grief yet. My brain simply filed the information away and moved on because at nine, I genuinely believed I was going to live forever.

I believed everyone I loved was going to live forever too.

That's the thing about perception when you're young. You don't see reality. You see a version of reality filtered through whatever cognitive framework your brain has developed so far. And my framework at then was simple: I was special. My life was perfect. Bad things happened to other people.

I had classmates whose mothers had died. Classmates whose fathers were gone. Classmates who couldn't afford breakfast. And somehow, in my child's mind, these facts existed separately from me. They were part of their reality, not mine. I was the prototype, the exception, the girl with smooth skin and good grades and a family that felt very permanent.

Looking back now, I realize my life wasn't actually perfect then. Things were happening around me. Difficulties existed. But the way I chose to interpret them, the way my developing brain processed information, created a narrative where everything was fine. Where I was safe. Where loss and drama was something that happened in other people's stories.

Psychologists call this the personal fable, a cognitive distortion common in childhood and adolescence where you believe you're special, unique, somehow exempt from the universal rules that apply to everyone else. It's a protective mechanism. Your brain isn't developed enough to process existential threat, so it simply decides you're invincible.

I held that belief until reality forcibly corrected it. More people that I knew died. More absences appeared where presence used to be. And slowly, very painfully, my perception migrated from "I'm special and untouchable" to "oh, none of us are actually safe."

But that's just one example of how perception works. How the stories we tell ourselves about reality are often more powerful than reality itself.

Here's another: I spent quite a few years believing I was ugly because of a comment someone made about my nose in secondary school.

One comment. One girl whose face I barely remember now, who had her own insecurities that were obvious and probably spoke from them, told me my nose was big. And I absorbed that comment like a gospel truth. Kept it with me for years. Used it as evidence every time I looked in the mirror and felt inadequate.

The absurd part? When I look at photos from that time now, when I actually examine my face objectively, my nose is completely normal. Proportional. Fine. Not big, not small, just a nose that fits my face the way noses are supposed to.

But perception doesn't care about objective reality. It cares about the story you've accepted as true.

Before that comment, I'd loved my face a whole lot. I'd been one of the shortest girls in my class, a bit chubby, dark or caramel skinned depending on the season, and none of it had bothered me. I was content in my own body in a way that's almost impossible to reclaim once you lose it.

Then I got access to my mother's tablet when our data processing teacher started giving us assignments that required the use of internet. From there, I'd casually drift into her Facebook out of curiosity, then I started seeing other people's faces on social media. Started consuming images of what beauty supposedly looked like. And suddenly, my own face wasn't enough anymore.

The pimples that appeared in SS2 didn't bother me initially. I barely noticed them but I knew it was resultant from the Eid that I used my sister's powder foam (or whatever the thing is called). I saw them, told myself my sister was beautiful even though she had pimples and I moved on just fine. But then I saw other girls online with clear skin and started deciding mine was now a problem. That was when I started perceiving my normal adolescent skin as a flaw that needed fixing.

This is what they mean when they say you become what you consume. Your perception of yourself is shaped not just by what you see in the mirror, but by what you compare that mirror image to. And social media floods you with comparisons that didn't exist before screens.

There's research on this. A 2014 study in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking found that the more time people spend on social media, the more likely they are to experience body dissatisfaction and decreased self-esteem. Not because social media is inherently evil, but because it provides unlimited access to curated, filtered versions of other people's lives that you then measure your unfiltered reality against.

Before social media, my reference point for beauty was the girls in my immediate environment and to the best of my knowledge, I was a masterpiece. Now it was girls across the world with professional lighting and editing software. My perception of what was normal totally changed, and suddenly I wasn't normal anymore.

Now it's not just about beauty. Perception shapes everything about how we exist through the world.

I grew up Muslim in a diverse environment, and when I got to university, I met people whose only perception of Islam came from the news or from growing up in homogeneous communities where Muslims were abstract concepts rather than actual humans. Some of them assumed I was Hausa because their mental framework said "Muslim equals Hausa." Some of them had negative associations with Islam because that's what their environment had taught them to perceive.

None of these perceptions were based on knowing me or knowing Islam. They were based on the information their brains had been exposed to, the narratives they'd absorbed, the cognitive shortcuts their minds had developed to make sense of groups they didn't have direct experience with.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman wrote about this in Thinking, Fast and Slow. Our brains are constantly creating shortcuts, heuristics, quick judgments based on limited information because processing everything consciously would be overwhelming. So we develop patterns. Categories. Perceptions that let us navigate the world efficiently even if they're not accurate.

The problem is we don't recognize we're doing this. We think our perceptions are objective observations of reality when really they're subjective interpretations filtered through our experiences, our environment, our cognitive limitations.

What prompted this mostly was that sometime last year, I got distracted during a reading session and found myself scrolling Pinterest in search of what I didn't lose. Somehow I came across a quote about perception that lodged itself in my brain and refused to leave. I can't remember the exact words now, but they prompted me to download two books on the psychology of perception. I finished one and abandoned the other halfway through to start reading fiction. Typical me.

The one I finished was The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks, and it was everything. The exact kind of book that keeps your brows furrowed through the entire read, the kind that makes you question every assumption you have about how the brain constructs reality. Psychology is so intriguing, so unsettling in the best way.

Sacks writes about patients with neurological conditions that reveal just how constructed our perception actually is. A man who can't recognize faces, including his own wife's. A woman who loses her proprioception and has to relearn how to move her body by watching it. People whose brains have been damaged in ways that completely alter how they experience reality.

The book makes one thing brutally clear: what we perceive as objective reality is actually our brain's best guess based on incomplete information. We're all walking around assuming we see the world as it is, when really we see a version our brain has constructed from sensory input, past experience, and cognitive shortcuts.

And this becomes even more complicated when you start questioning your own identity.

Lately, I've been asking myself: who am I when no one is watching?

Who am I at home, alone, with no audience to perform for? If nobody complimented my Qira’ah, would I still recite daily? If nobody noticed how I dressed, would I still dress this way? If nobody praised my discipline or my reading habits or any of the things I've built my identity around, would I still do them?

The question unsettles me because I'm not sure I know the answer.

Psychologist Carl Rogers distinguished between the "real self" and the "ideal self." The real self is who you actually are. The ideal self is who you think you should be. And the gap between them creates anxiety, drives behavior, shapes how you present yourself to the world.

But there's a third category Rogers didn't name explicitly: the perceived self. The version of you that exists because other people's perceptions have shaped how you see yourself. The identity you've constructed based on external feedback, social expectations, the roles you've been assigned or have claimed.

I call myself a bibliophile. I love reading. But do I love it intrinsically, or have I built an identity around being "the girl who reads" and now I'm maintaining that identity to stay consistent with how I'm perceived?

I pray five times a day, recite my Qur’an, follow Islamic guidelines. But am I doing these things because they're genuinely core to who I am, or because I've been socialized into them, because they're expected, because my environment has shaped my perception of what a good Muslim looks like and I'm performing that perception?

I don't think the answer is binary. It's probably both. Some parts of my identity are genuinely mine, chosen and claimed and real. Other parts are performances I've internalized so deeply I can't tell where the performance ends and my authentic self begins.

And maybe that's okay. Or not. I figure identity is always a mix of what's intrinsic and what's absorbed from environment. And we're all constantly negotiating between who we actually are and who we've learned to be.

I don't even know the point I'm trying to drive home with this but I love that it stimulated my brain and made me retrospect. Now, I believe it matters that we ask the question. That we examine our perceptions of ourselves instead of accepting them as fixed truth.

Peprception is malleable. It changes based on what we consume, who we're around, what stories we tell ourselves. The girl who thought she was invincible learned she wasn't. The girl who thought her nose was too big learned it was fine. The version of yourself you're performing today might not be the version you'd choose if you stripped away all external influence and sat with who you actually are underneath.

Philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote, "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." She was talking about gender, but the principle applies more broadly: we're not born with fixed identities. We become who we are through a process of perception, interpretation, socialization, choice.

The question is whether we're becoming consciously or unconsciously. Whether we're examining our perceptions or just accepting them. Whether we're choosing our identities or letting them be chosen for us by environment, by expectation, by the accumulated weight of other people's perceptions. This also reminds me of what Ali Abdaal said,is the concept of “Be yourself” really advisable when being yourself leaves you mediocre and stuck?

I don't have clean answers to all these questions. And I din’t know if they all make sense. I'm still figuring out who I really am when nobody's watching. Still trying to distinguish between the parts of myself that are genuine and the parts that are performances.

This piece has been sitting in my drafts since I finished that Sacks book, waiting for me to find the words to make sense of what perception actually means. Not the academic definition, but the lived experience of realizing your entire reality is constructed by a brain that's doing its best with limited information and unlimited bias.

But I think the asking matters. The examination matters. Because perception shapes reality, and if you never question your perceptions, you never get to choose which reality you're living in.

You just accept the one your brain constructed from whatever information it happened to encounter. And that seems like too important a thing to leave to chance.