First-person experience is what something is like for the person living it, rather than how it looks to an observer.
Two people can see the same smile and describe a successful evening. The person smiling may have spent it making sure nobody noticed they wanted to leave.
The outside account isn’t necessarily false. It is incomplete.
You were there. Your experience belongs in the account.
Did you enjoy the conversation? Did you feel able to disagree? Was the touch pleasant, tolerated or difficult to judge because you were concentrating on the other person?
Those questions matter even when the event looked lovely in photographs.
I AWAKE begins close to this lived perspective. Writing, bodily attention and guided imagination let you describe more than the visible result. You can then consider your account alongside what happened and what other people experienced, without granting any one view the whole story.
Lived body explores the body as experienced, not only observed. Perspective-taking makes room for another person’s view without requiring yours to disappear.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s Maurice Merleau-Ponty introduces a philosopher who placed perception and the lived body at the centre of his work. It provides a deeper background to why experience can’t be fully described from the outside.