One of my core beliefs is that it is impossible to fit another person inside my head; they are far too complex for my mental models of them to do them justice. The only way to understand them, and do them justice, is to meet them in open dialogue, to give them the chance to share their thoughts and react to ours. Conversely, it is a tiny bit like killing someone, as Bakhtin says, to treat them as an object that you can understand and predict. It is to deny the most deeply human thing in us, our capacity to learn and change.

Bakhtin also has this great line somewhere that “on a human being you cannot apply the identity relation A = A.” By this he means, as I understand it, that a human is not a fixed, determined entity that you can capture in a definition. Even if you could—hypothetically!—fully understand another person and say to them, “You are A,” they would no longer be A, because a human being has the capacity to react to what is said about her and move beyond it. People are vast, morphing things.

When Johanna and I talk with each other, there is a constant mirroring going on, where we, by reflecting on ourselves and on how we affect each other, arrive at ever deeper understandings of ourselves. Early in our relationship, for instance, we had some painful conversations about the limitations in our ways of talking with each other—my way of constantly thinking out loud, and her way of asking questions and keeping her feelings to herself (which made me talk even more). But as soon as we, by mirroring ourselves in each other, caught sight of ourselves and, in this case, our limitations—then we could also step beyond them. We could talk about how we behaved, and the problems that created, and through that conversation we changed: we gained a new view of ourselves, we changed our behaviors, we developed a language that helped us talk about our problems, and strategies that lessen them; gradually, we become different people. A ≠ A.

As long as we live, we never fully coincide with ourselves—we have the freedom to go beyond what we have been, and we are in constant flux.

Even though I understand this on an intellectual level (that you can never fully understand another person, and that everything we learn about ourselves is input into our process of change), I never cease being surprised by it in practice. Despite the fact that Johanna and I have spent nearly every day together for the past thirteen years, and have kept up a deep and intimate conversation the whole time, we keep realizing that we have not understood each other; we keep finding out that there is more Otherness to each other than we had anticipated; topics where we’ve talked past each other for years. One small example of this was the day before yesterday, when we were discussing some of the ideas I'm writing about here, and we got into how I often get uncomfortable if I talk with some I don’t know that well and then the converation stalls because no one can think of anything to say, so you just sit there silently. 

Johanna said, “Interesting… I think it is nice to be silent, that it's a way of giving each other time to feel out where you want the conversation to go next. But you get uncomfortable?"

"I feel stressed, yeah. It feels like I will be judged, as if the conversation is a failure if it stalls, so I feel pressure to come up with something that will open the conversation up. I like it when the thoughts flow freely in the conversation, and when it stops it feels like a blockage."

"…it feels like a blockage?" Johanna said, and I stopped talking and sat for a long while thinking about what I had said—it had just been a thought I'd tossed out, one that felt obvious to me (that conversations have to flow to be good), and when Johanna was surprised by that thought, I saw what I had said in a new light. I realized that she didn't think the same way I did about this, that you could think about it differently, and I also became fully aware of my fear of conversations not flowing for the first time. And Johanna also realized this about me for the first time; it surprised her. 

Despite all our talking, and despite all our talking about talking, this truth about me had never come into the light. And as soon as I realized it, I saw myself, and the feelings that silence in conversation provokes in me, in a new light, and I became curious to explore silence anew—to use these insights about who I am to, perhaps, become someone else.

You can think of conversations (when they are open and intimate in this way) as a process where you extract insights from your inner life, work them over by sending them through words and into another’s mind and back again, and bring new perspectives into your inner life in order to change… I'm searching for a metaphor for this. One image is that of cranes lifting each other. Another image is that our vast, unknowable inner lives are like the sun: it is a source of energy that streams into the conversation, the way sunlight streams into an ecosystem from the outside, allowing it to grow and change. It is our Otherness, everything that we can’t grasp about ourselves and others, that keeps things growing and changing. It is the indeterminacy, the unfinalizability, the freedom—that is what allows a conversation to keep opening up forever.