The Parable of the Invisible Ass Pad
Many people have a signature fashion item, like funky glasses or a favorite color they wear all of the time.
Steve Jobs had his black turtleneck. Seth Godin has his mismatched socks. Mark Zuckerberg has his T-shirt and hoodies.
Me? I have an ass pad.
The pad isn’t actually for my ass. It’s for my back. I have a degenerative disease in my spine, which has caused some widespread damage to my discs. When I sit for long periods of time, gravity compresses those discs and creates a lot of pain.
The best way I can describe it is as if someone took a large fishhook and slipped it up under your skin at the base of your spine and then started to pull upwards, lifting you off the chair. The longer you sit, the deeper the hook sinks, the more you lift and the more intense the pain becomes.
As you can imagine, this makes long meetings a nightmare. So, whenever I head into one, I bring along my ass pad to make things more bearable.
Our Perceptual Blindness
I’ve learned two important lessons after years of hauling around a big blue cushion the size of a DVD player.
First, I wish I had purchased it in black so it would match my purse.
Second, people are mainly preoccupied with themselves. They might notice your oddities and mistakes, but most of the time they don’t really SEE them.
For example, sometimes I’ll joke about the ass pad in a meeting and someone will say, genuinely confused, “What pad?”
We humans have a limited capacity for attention, which also limits the amount of information we can process at any particular time. This can lead to something called perceptual blindness. (One of the most famous examples of it is the psychological experiment commonly referred to as The Invisible Gorilla.)
In today’s busy media landscape, the information we process each day (and the noise that surrounds that information) is louder than ever. That means our perceptual blindness is amplified, too.
In the course of a day an army of gorillas might walk by, but we likely miss them because so many other things — social media notifications, random emails, alerts about news that isn’t really news — are sucking up our focus, instead.
So, it makes no sense to spend your day worrying about what other people think of you. Chances are they aren’t noticing you at all. If they DO it’s probably for a good reason.
People See What They Want to See
One of my favorite examples of the power of perception in action happened a few years ago when I was at an airport standing in line at Starbucks.
After I ordered my drink, I flipped open my computer bag to fish out my wallet. As I was pawing through the bag, I inadvertently gave the woman standing next to me a glimpse of the ass pad shoved in the main pocket.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the woman tilt her head and scrunch up her face like she was in deep thought.
“She’s probably wondering why I have a cushion in my computer bag instead of a laptop.” I thought to myself. “I bet she thinks I’m a total freak.”
Sure enough, after a few moments, the woman leaned over to me and said, “Can I ask…what’s that thing in your bag?”
“Um…you mean may ass pad?” I replied, flipping back open the bag to show it to her and trying to act super casual.
Instead of answering, the woman swung her own computer bag in front of her, propped it open and pointed a familiar dark blue lump crammed inside hers, too. She grinned at me and said, “You call yours an ass pad, huh? That’s funny.”
We shared a laugh as she paid for her drink and moved to the side of the line.
“I’m so glad you said something to me about your pad,” I said to the woman. “I’ve never met anyone else with one before. Aren’t they great?”
“Totally,” she replied, “But it’d be even better if I had one in black.”
Interested in this topic? Please follow me on Medium to read more posts about chronic pain and my new book, Chronic Pain Recovery: A Practical Guide to Putting Your Life Back Together After Everything Has Fallen Apart, now available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, iBooks, Google Play and Kobo.
