The Irony of Knowing or Not

 

situational irony - noun - something happens that is different to what was expected (Google).

Life is filled to the brim with situational irony, particularly when it comes to relationships. You might think you know someone well–a colleague, a friend, a mentor, a spouse, a lover, a relative–over the course of a lifetime, yet may never realize that individual completely. And just when you think you've uncovered specific truths about the person, perhaps from the person himself or herself,  Death can draw the curtain and either contradict what you thought you knew or reveal even more knowledge, neither of which you had expected. 

Case in point: I grew up thinking that my mother's family was partially German and Polish by descent. Why? My mother told me. If my memory serves me well (and it usually does), she said that my grandmother, whom my sister and I never knew since she had passed when our mother was fourteen, had been born somewhere between Berlin and Szczecin on the border of East Germany and Poland. Years after my mom's sudden death, her distant cousins, whom I had never before met, invited my father, daughter and me to a family reunion. According to one of the elders in the tribe–a niece of my grandmother–my grandmother and all of her siblings were born in Eastern Lithuania, nowhere near the East German/Polish border. Within seconds, adult I reformulated an adolescent identity crisis that wasn't cleared up until my daughter gave me a Christmas gift of Ancestry.com. Eventually, I learned that I am one hundred percent Lithuanian on my mother's side. So, just when I thought I had a clear indication of who my mother was, and who I was, I really didn't.

The bottomline is that the more you know about anyone or anything, the more you come to know that you actually know very little. I believe it was Einstein who first came up with a similar ironic statement: "The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know" (Google). In some cases, you can't even know yourself that well as self-perception is always skewed. It is like hearing your voice in your head but then listening to it on a recording and realizing it sounds vastly different. You perceive yourself one way, but others perceive you another. Rather than fight the impulse to disagree ("No, I'm really not like that."), the smart thing to do is accept the point of view of others because you can never quite get around situational irony. Just when you think you've got yourself and everybody else all figured out, evidence is unearthed that changes everything. 

Nothing truly is what it seems to be.