What my superpower couldn’t see

I’ve had this awesome superpower ever since I was young where I could go into a room and just observing I could read everyone. The real life “Read the room”. Whether I had a friend or just alone, I would listen in and look around figuring out everyone's name, maybe where they are from, if they have friends or not, the popular kids and the weird ones. I saw it all. In my mind they all had pretty similar ways of acting, the popular kids would be loud, wear the same cool trending clothes, and have all the social media apps. The weird kids would be quieter, soft, shy, stay in their own corner, harder for me to understand them.

And because I was very nosy, I would listen in, and eavesdrop on all their conversations, and based on observing I would convince myself I knew them, gathering every little detail, and store it away in my brain. From head to toe I would read them and find out all the information I need, if I want to be friends, or stay away. This is pretty much how I worked my social skills for years. And I continued to believe this worked, by watching people and I completely understood their life story. 

Then one day the belief reached its limit. I had reached a situation where a girl that I had known from school was sharing parts of their life that you can’t read from just observing. She was a little quiet, nice, not presumably my friend but I had gotten to know her over the years. She shared something very private she had been hiding for years. Something that completely changed how I saw her. And that’s when it hit me that my superpowers had only ever shown me the surface, and was completely oblivious to what was underneath. 

And I just sat there and thought about all the years I had been judging. My brain would automatically shut her out, and avoid her. I never truly saw the other side of the story, and was in shock, disbelief, and some of all disappointed in my superpower. Why couldn’t it detect it? I saw the silent battles she had been fighting and I had no idea that was going on. My assumptions got the best of me, I always saw people from the shallow end, comfortable, never thinking there was a different side. But now seeing deeper, I saw how much more there was on the other side. The real life experience of never judging a book by its cover. 

And that experience taught me a lot of things my superpower never could reveal, I can’t read someone based off of my assumptions, you will never fully understand everyone's life story, but it's not from the outside that makes a person, it the silent battles, their empathy, experiences, the way they treat others. So now I am learning to settle down my assumptions about people, because you think you know everything about someone, but in reality you still know nothing. And as for my superpower it wasn’t ineffective, it was only part of a picture. And most of the time, the best part of a person is the things you can’t read from the outside.