Unfortunately it is some what unavoidable that we will be misunderstood in our lives. In fact, I would even argue that all of us are all misunderstanding each other to some extent because there is no way for us to completely know what another person may be thinking.
Even more unfortunately our base reaction to being misunderstood is negative. It hurts to be misunderstood especially from people we care about. Sometimes we may even be angry that we are misunderstood, especially if the misunderstanding results at a kind of a loss for us.
Perhaps there are cultural aspects of this as well; Koreans have a word for the very specific kind of frustration that comes from being misunderstood, eok-ul. I think it’s safe to say that being misunderstood isn’t exactly the best kind of a life experience.
And this can happen so frequently everywhere. At the vet’s office, at work, at home with your spouse… With this many opportunities to be misunderstood, it almost feels like a miracle for us to be understood.
Speaking of feeling understood, we hear a lot about feeling seen or heard on social media. I have yet to see somebody upset at being understood, so it must be a good thing that we are seen and heard.
Why is this? I believe it has a lot to do with being right.
As an immigrant from Asia, I was very conscious of the odor I have when I was in elementary school because I heard that Americans think Asians are stinky in a garlicy way.
Are we stinky? Well, Koreans do tend to be crazy about garlic but not all of us are stinky. Even with that, there are people who have had a wild garlic lunch and do reek of garlic. From a foreigner’s perspective, it makes sense that they think Koreans are generally stinky.
But what they might not know is just how much garlic we eat on a daily basis. Korea is the world’s second when it comes to individual garlic consumption. China consumes 14.3kg/person, and we eat a whopping 6.2kg/person when the ratio of our population is 28:1. It’s sort of impossible for us to not smell of garlic because if you take away garlic, there really is no Korean food left to eat.
And this story isn’t exclusive to me. So many instances of Korean athletes’ international success feature a story of garlic body odor. Jeong-Hwan Ahn of 2002 World Cup fame had troubles in Italy because of body odor, Chan-Ho Park of the Los Angeles Dodgers had a similar trouble. It’s a common bonding topic of Koreans when they meet overseas, how stressed they are about their body odor.
The crazy thing is… Then they have the audacity to call other Asians stinky.
We all seek to be understood when it comes to validating the story that we are not that bad. And at the same time we don’t seek to understand how other people come to be at a certain state. Racist Koreans say South Asians smell like aromatics; but how can they not? It’s exactly like the garlic situation in Korea (in Korea we don’t consider garlic to be an aromatic lol).
And this kind of validation wants to follow the trend and direction of superiority and shame. We seek seeing and understanding from people who we think are more right or better than us, and we dismiss, ignore people who we think are wrong or less.
My Buddhist teacher, Ven. Pomnyun Sunim, states it like this: “love without understanding is violence”. The example he uses is sexual violence. From the offender’s perspective, they can say “Hey, why are you acting so sensitively? I’m doing this because I think you’re pretty, and you should be flattered”. But from the victim’s perspective, it is a repulsive violation of personal autonomy.
So what must we do in the face of misunderstanding? We must see that it is not malice but ignorance, combined with the very human desire to be right, along with a sprinkling of our brains’ default tendency to make things black or white.
There is no right or wrong or good or bad, we come from different individual histories and contextual definitions of what is anything. The more we can talk our differences out, the more we can see that in the end we are all on the same side.
This does not mean you have to unilaterally accept everything that comes your way and never do anything about what people do to you. This means, when you perceive a difference that you are finding hard to understand you resolve it in a peaceful way that doesn’t antagonize the other person.
Are some misunderstandings easier to untangle than others? I would definitely say so. From my personal experience and observing other case studies, I think the greatest misunderstanding to resolve is that of the parent-child relationship.
Am I asking you to forgive your parents like, right now? Nope, but in case you’re looking for something to work towards, I think that’s a great topic to keep in mind.