What is it like to be you?

I experienced a jolt of recognition when the author Elizabeth Strout mentioned in an interview how she tends to inhabit other people. She described the experience as having the “molecules” of others move into her, a sensation she first had as a child and that continues when characters “show up” while she is writing.  I knew exactly what she meant.

 

As a boy, I created a game in which I imagined I could enter the heads of other people — the woman at the bus stop, the man sweeping the floor of our school. I wanted to experience their life and the small details I imagined — as though the hot chocolate and thick slice of buttered bread the woman had for breakfast, the gentle way the janitor spoke to his children would give me a clue.

 

The longing to dive into other people’s heads never left me; in fact, it has become stronger since I discovered that everybody has a story, even if they themselves don’t know it. When I talk to a taxi driver in Dubai, an artist I happened to sit next to at a dinner in Hong Kong, or a woman waiting in line at a pastry shop in Barcelona, the same question returns: what is it like to be you?

 

I often wonder why I feel this need to become one with people I happen to run into. Of course, we never truly know why we do the things we do but I suspect the habit Elizabeth Strout and I share is driven by a need to escape that started in childhood. Equally important is an endless curiosity and a desire to connect with others, even with people we do not know personally, like our readers.

 

Elizabeth Strout once said that fiction is a way of making us kinder. When you read, you get to inhabit another person’s soul for a while — and that can only make you more generous.

 

I want to bring that same generosity out in the audience watching the videos made by my foundation’s artists. By showing the humanity of people from very diverse backgrounds the viewer is given a chance to understand others better. This is especially important in a time of deep division.

 

It’s uplifting to discover that I share this impulse to inhabit others with a writer I admire. It reminds me once more that I’m not alone, which is exactly the feeling both Elizabeth Strout and I want to transmit.