“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.“
Last month I went to a friend’s wedding in Johannesburg. The ceremony and reception were both out of doors – adherence to Covid restrictions was almost guaranteed by the Highveld weather, where “spring” is a misnomer (it was September, but the mercury must have hit the thirties). Before the vows, the bride’s eight-year-old daughter did a reading from The Velveteen Rabbit. It was the well-known passage where the toy horse tells the toy rabbit what it takes to become “real”.
“Real isn’t how you are made,” says the Skin Horse, “it’s something that happens to you.” By the time you are real, he says, your eyes have fallen out, you are loose in the joints, and your coat has mostly worn off. In short, you are loved into realness. You become real after bearing the brunt of love, after taking love’s full course. “It doesn’t happen all at once,” says the horse – “You become. It takes a long time.” And it’s a contact sport. Toys that break easily do not often become real. “Does it hurt?” asks the rabbit. A little, says the horse. But “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
For us humans, does being loved make us real people? Is love not just the ultimate goal but, in fact, the true measure of personhood?
What makes us “real”? I’m not talking about knowing whether or not we exist, whether we are live flesh and blood, or even whether we are conscious, but rather about what makes us real “in context”.
The real you
When we want somebody to “get real”, what we’re looking for is usually a sense of clear-eyed groundedness – in other words, realness as in realism. When we want somebody to be real with us, more often than not we mean honesty, integrity, directness if not total openness. We don’t want games or pretense, we want genuineness; we want authenticity.
“Authentic” is a word that carries a sense not just of truth, or fidelity, but of inherent worth or value. An authentic, or original, item is presumed to be more valuable than a copy (this applies even to NFTs, which is something that defies my comprehension). Similarly, for the Velveteen Rabbit, Real-ness was really a measure of being valued, chosen, cherished. And, uncoincidentally, authenticity can also be seen as a value in the more abstract sense, namely a principle that we hold dear, like integrity or truthfulness.
Authenticity, we generally believe, means being fully ourselves. How do we know we are being authentic? We know it within ourselves – but also, just as importantly, we are recognised by others.
With that in mind, I propose an alternative meaning of Realness, which may ultimately be indistinguishable from love: seenness.
Are we seen into realness?
Personhood from the outside in
In the West, at least, we think of personhood as being about an individual, independent self. To be recognised is, after all, to be distinguished, to stand out as unique. We also tend to think of the self as fixed and unchanging, at least by the time we reach adulthood.
But whether we think about it consciously or take it for granted, personhood is a process. We have different states of personhood at different life stages. Our bodies grow and change, and so does our sense of identity. At the very least, then, we might agree that we are persons in time.
The process of becoming, then, is that of self-realising.
What other contexts create our personhood? Though we are individuals, do we not take on different roles with others? Are we not, then, different people in different contexts? More importantly, can the self exist outside of these contexts?
To me, being an individual means – paradoxically – having a part to play. After all, how can we stand out from nothing? Put differently, what is the part without the whole?
There’s a well-known thought experiment about a tree falling in a forest with nobody around to hear it. The key question – “Does it make a sound?” – is really an inquiry into whether sound, at least as we understand it, is a product of our sensory organs; a “relative phenomenon”, if you will. To adapt this idea: if we become fully self-realised individuals, but there is nobody around to recognise us, does it matter? And if there is no recognition outside of relation, is self-realisation even possible without the collective?
More extremely, if nobody sees us, do we really exist?
Real in relation
Thought experiments aside, here are two real-life phenomena that talk to the concept of the self in relation. The first is the isiZulu greeting Sawubona, which literally translates as “We see you”. “Seeing” here means not just acknowledging another person, but recognising them and bringing them into existence. It is therefore also understood as an expression of value – “I see you and you are important to me”. Even more interesting, I believe, is the use of “we”, instead of “I” – for one uses this greeting even when solo. The use of “we” derives from the cultural tradition of acknowledging one’s ancestral lineage, implying that one is never alone. (See this TEDx Talk with Roche Mamabolo, who talks about this principle of seeing others in the context of service and entrepreneurship.)
To me, “we see you” is also a clear link to the second example; namely, the meaning of the word ubuntu. As represented in the isiZulu saying Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, which means “I am because we are”, or “a person is a person through people”, ubuntu is more of a philosophy than a word, and therefore does not really have an easy English equivalent (it can be roughly translated as “humanity towards others”, or the belief in a universal bond that connects all people). Basically, it means what Sawubona implies: I am we. I am nothing without us.
To be seen, to be acknowledged and ultimately, I think, to be loved, really means to be understood. We may tend to think of understanding as being recognised in our uniqueness. But what if understanding, when it comes to what we truly want and need, were about recognising sameness?
If we are not only seen and loved as an individual, but also seen and loved as “one of us”, are we real to the world?
My story
I have recently come to wonder what kind of adult I am. This probably sounds like a funny question, so let me explain.
I spent twelve years working in a large corporate, got married, and bought a house; then, I left my job, took a sabbatical, became a freelancer, and my husband and I sold the house and most of our things and moved cities. We are now closer to family and friends, but further from “settled”. Relationships are tighter, and plans are looser. Personal ties are shorter, and so are time frames. My career was ticking along; now it is a blank slate. On most days, I am blissfully present; on others, I feel like I can’t see into the future.
What kind of “reality” is this? On the one hand, it’s a very fortunate one; on the other, it might look like traditional adulthood in reverse (minus the kids – that would be a hard step to undo).
Among other reasons, I left my job because I had the slow and sneaking feeling that I wasn’t allowed to be myself (I’m fully aware that this probably sounds like classic Millenial pathos). I feel more myself now, partly because the things that are important to me feel clearer and more part of my daily activities. What’s also important is that I feel more liberated in the relationships I can invest in. In other words, I feel more real to other people.
At the same time, I also often feel a sense of unrealness to the world. Until recently, I hadn’t been part of a work team for eighteen months. I haven’t been to an office for two years – though to be fair, many people haven’t, even those who maintained their so-called nine-to-five through the global pandemic.
And beyond this is the way in which we engage with the world digitally, which we now take as “normal” reality but which, if you think about it, is in fact pretty unreal. We not only engage constantly with social media screens, but also with the virtual puppet show screenings that are online meetings, where various colleagues and strangers show up as talking heads in boxes. To our primitive brains, seeing is believing. If we can’t see a live person there, at some level we don’t believe they exist.
But, of course, the relationships are still there. They’re real in our heads. And, of course, post-vaccination we have largely come back to relating in real life, in-person.
The point of all this is that most of our senses of “realness” are relative, in every sense of the word. Part of what I describe about my own present existential mini-crisis might sound simply like comparing myself to others, which we all know is supposed to be a recipe for lifelong dissatisfaction. Nonetheless, I can’t get away from defining “realness” as being “in relation”. It’s not that autonomy and independence are worth nothing, but rather that my meaning-of-life follow-up question is, perhaps: “Independence for what?” – or, more importantly, “for whom?”
All & None of the Above 