People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person. They didn't see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts, then they white-masked themselves by calling me the lewd one.

People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person. They didn't see me, they saw their lewd thoughts, then they white-masked themselves by calling me the lewd one.

I didn't know that other people thought things about me. I didn't know that they looked.

كنت أعرف الناس؛ يظٌنون بأفكارهم لئلا يتلقاها الآخرون ببرود وجفاء، كنت أعلم أنهم يحيون ويتحركون مخدوعين خادعين، متنكرين متسترين، غرباء عن البشر، غرباء عن ذواتهم ! إنما القلب بعينه ينبض في كل صدر بشري !

People look at me as this very, I don't know, Confucius-like wise person — which I'm not. They don't see all the shit that I've been through.

She said my problem was that I saw things in people that they didn’t see in themselves.

It was but that, seeing him and so imagining that something about him was otherwise, automatically they feared him.

When finding that people held the same views as I, I persuaded myself that I held them differently.

People look at me, and they have a certain perception, and they slap a label on me. The guy you saw in a wrestling ring is not who I am.

People think you're Jesus because you've gone through something special. They treat you like you've got special knowledge, or they treat you a little bit like Frankenstein. Of course, those two responses are related. Neither of them is accurate. But that's the kind of vibe you can get — a lot of us who have disabilities know very well.

But I remember one thing: it wasn't me that started acting deaf, it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all.

We see people not as they are, but as they appear to us. And these appearances are usually misleading.

People who hadn't noticed me, or who had written me off as a game show host, started to reassess me. There were people who hadn't seen me as a stand-up artist and liked it. Suddenly I was in fashion again.

So all they see of me is a façade. There are times when I am forced to sit with them and on such occasions I simply ignore their petty criticisms, not because I am particularly shy but because I consider it pointless. As a result, they now look upon me as a dullard.
"Well, we never expected this!" they all say. "No one liked her. They all said she was pretentious, awkward, difficult to approach, prickly, too fond of her tales, haughty, prone to versifying, disdainful, cantankerous and scornful; but when you meet her, she is strangely meek, a completely different person altogether!"
How embarrassing! Do they really look upon me as such a dull thing, I wonder? But I am what I am. Her Majesty has also remarked more than once that she had thought I was not the kind of person with whom she could ever relax, but that I have now become closer to her than any of the others. I am so perverse and standoffish. If only I can avoid putting off those for whom I have a genuine regard.