Reinventing reality

 

 

Friday, August 10, 2012

 

I hate being censored – even in my personal life.

My experiences spill out onto other people, and they hate when I record the details.

Freud and others pointed out that people constantly reinvent themselves, that Aristostol was wrong when he said “Not even God can change the past.”

We do it all the time, molding past events to suit our new reality, reading our experiences as kind of tea leaves to what we are now.

Sometimes, we deliberately distort the past, shaping stories that will fit better with other people’s preconceptions: a father who is alive in 2012, gets killed off in 1987 so that his children can boast of hardship of having been raised without one. Sometimes, we paint the past in grander terms in order to better suit someone we want to know today, such as emphasizing heroic anti-organized crime activities of our parents in order to sell ourselves to someone who hates organized crime and who has such a tale in the past as well.

Most dangerous for souls like these, the mythmakers, is the truth or anyone like me who records day to day activities or compares one story with another.

This is why it is important to keep people like me silent – sometimes at gun point, sometimes through false accusations, trying to make us out as distorting truth, when we really reflect a clearer view of the world.

My whole life has been recording the day to day events that go on around me, most often revealing aspects of truth in the small details myth makers gloss over in order to reinvent themselves.

This makes me dangerous, especially when the mythmakers start to believe their own distorted visions.

Socrates suffered a similar fate because he let people hang themselves with their own lies.

Very few people who look into a mirror like what they see, preferring to distort the past in order to make the present more bearable.

I guess we all need to find comfort in some way, and I suppose, I have reinvented my past from time to time to keep from looking too closely at the warts.

I simply hate being forced to live up to someone else’s lies.