Seeing Through Many Eyes

By Dylan Jade Rackley

Somewhere in the second or third year of a social work degree, the coursework stops being information and starts being a mirror. You're taught to sit with critical reflection until it becomes reflex — what Jan Fook describes as surfacing and interrogating the assumptions buried inside your own practice — to locate yourself inside every system you study, to ask not just what is happening but where do I stand in relation to it. I didn't expect that training to turn on me. It did. Somewhere between Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory and Crenshaw's intersectionality, laid over each other, I realised I'd spent years collecting perspectives without ever naming what I was doing.

Nietzsche had the phrase waiting. "There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective 'knowing'," he wrote in the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, "and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our 'concept' of this thing, our 'objectivity,' be." Not one correct view, arrived at by removing yourself from the picture. More eyes. I'd been running that argument for years without knowing it had a name.

For years I called it contradiction. History in one hand, what comes next in the other, two positions that felt like they were at war inside me. They do look different, and they always will. But they were never opposed. They were one thing described from two places, both accounts accurate, differing because I was standing somewhere different each time I looked. That is what every angle since has done. Not softened the differences. Sharpened the shape underneath them.

I think about an ethics tutorial, a year ago now, and what an ethical dilemma actually is. It was taught the way it's usually taught: identify a problem, wrestle with it, resolve it, file it away. My first thought was that I didn't have any — decision-making had never felt like wrestling anything. By the criteria in front of the room, I plainly did have ethical dilemmas. By my own experience, I have never had one in my life. What I had were signposts. Tension arrived to tell me more than one perspective had converged, hard, on the same point, and the decision was never separate from that tension; it was guided by it. Both descriptions were entirely true. I already knew it somewhere underneath language; what the tutorial gave me was the articulation. Once something has words, you can use it deliberately. Not two truths. As many as I can hold, each one entirely true to whoever is standing inside it. It gives me a way to sit down with someone, understand where they're standing, and grow alongside them rather than at them.

Not long after, in an equity and diversity tutorial, a lecturer worked through a section on LGBTIQA+ experience, choosing each word as if she were carrying something precious and terrified of dropping it. I recognised that carefulness immediately, because I live inside its mirror image every day, the same cognitive load running the other way. She wasn't missing anything. She simply hadn't stood where I'd stood, and had no way to know that the caution itself was the obstacle.

Melanie Tervalon and Jann Murray-García named this distinction in 1998, writing about physician training. The goal, they argued, should not be cultural competence — a body of knowledge you acquire and then possess — but cultural humility: "a lifelong commitment to self-evaluation and self-critique, to redressing the power imbalances ... and to developing mutually beneficial and nonpaternalistic partnerships with communities." Competence is a destination. Humility is a practice that never finishes. My lecturer was reaching for the first, holding the material like something breakable. What the room needed was the second.

So I asked her questions, and I answered hers, plainly, without flinching, without taking insult where it might have been offered. This is close to what Paulo Freire meant by conscientização — critical consciousness as something that emerges between people in dialogue, never deposited by one into another. Nothing was resolved, and nothing needed to be. She stopped tiptoeing, that's all, and I walked out understanding something: that perspective is the whole thing. Not the better one. Just the one you happen to be holding, and what becomes possible when you lend it.

The same habit taught me to read everywhere I'd already been. I travelled long before I had any framework for what it was doing to me, and once I looked back it returned in fragments, unranked, each insisting on a different feeling. Zagreb, weight in every stone. Novi Sad, joy chosen despite everything, worn as a way of living rather than a wound. Copenhagen, a city engineered for the future yet built entirely for the present moment. None of it taught me anything while I stood there, but it revealed so much, surfacing years later, uninvited, while I was thinking about something else entirely.

Cities and tutorials give you other people's positions. The same thing can be done alone, and writing is where I learned to do it. I used to write in one long emotional rush, call it finished, and it read exactly like that: charged, shapeless, all feeling and no spine. What I do now is stand in three places on purpose. First, the emotional one. Write it hot, exactly as it comes, no editing, no flinching, because that perspective knows things the other two cannot reach. Then I step outside myself entirely and read it as a stranger would, someone who owes me nothing and wasn't there. Then the analytical pass, cold, separating what was actually true from what merely felt true while I was burning.

The middle step turns out to be the load-bearing one. Psychologists call it self-distancing: the difference between reliving an experience through your own eyes and watching yourself inside it from further back. Jiyoung Park, Özlem Ayduk and Ethan Kross found that expressive writing itself promotes that shift, and that the shift is what does the work — people who moved toward a self-distanced perspective showed reduced emotional reactivity as far out as six months later. Writing it hot is not the useful part. Being able to stand somewhere else afterwards and read it back is.

None of these eyes cancel each other out, and I've stopped waiting for them to. They sharpen each other, the way looking at something from four directions doesn't blur its shape; it makes the shape impossible to miss.

So here is what I'd ask you to hold, both ways at once. Your perspective matters. It is a truth, built out of everywhere you've stood, and nobody gets to tell you it isn't. It is also just one. One of eight billion, no heavier than the person beside you on the train. Both are true, and the moment you carry them together, something opens. You stop defending a position and start collecting them.

I don't know how many more eyes I'll see through before I'm done. I hope it's a great many more. None of them, so far, has taken me further from myself. Every single one has brought me closer, and closer to everyone else, which I suspect was always the same movement. That's the humility the whole thing runs on. Not that your view is small, but that it's one of many, and that's precisely what makes you part of the village.

Sources

Fook, J. (2016). Social Work: A Critical Approach to Practice (3rd ed.). SAGE Publications.

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design. Harvard University Press.

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139–167. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8/

Nietzsche, F. (1887/1989). On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, §12 (W. Kaufmann, trans.). Vintage Books.

Tervalon, M. & Murray-García, J. (1998). Cultural Humility Versus Cultural Competence: A Critical Distinction in Defining Physician Training Outcomes in Multicultural Education. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, 9(2), 117–125. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10073197/

Freire, P. (1970/2000). Pedagogy of the Oppressed (M. B. Ramos, trans.). Continuum.

Park, J., Ayduk, Ö. & Kross, E. (2016). Stepping back to move forward: Expressive writing promotes self-distancing. Emotion, 16(3), 349–364. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26479774/