Not That
My younger iterations are painful simulacra to recall, not for anything truly painful, but for the cringe I’m afflicted with when entering the halls of my memory. Lies within lies, propping up a fake person trying to seem smart and in control of his life, totally consumed with self-loathing for knowing how stark the contrast was to the portrayal.
It’s a bitter appraisal, but it often makes me wonder how I could have done it differently? What was everyone else doing? At the time I was laboring under the delusion that nobody lied except for me; maybe little white lies as social lubricant, but major, personality shifting constructs? I thought that was something I was inventing as I went. I took everyone else at face value and hated myself for creating whatever I was pretending to be, absorbed by failure, imagining thousands of splintered little versions of myself used up as shields or masks for situations I didn’t know how to deal with, diluting my soul with a compulsion to lie. There was such an immutability to it that it felt like my real personality was just a worthless loser who could, at best, pretend to be the person I wanted to be. At most I could only ever feel the second-hand glow from that perspective and know it wasn’t mine unless I pretended it was.
How could I have done it differently? Where did I get it from?
“You can tell us anything- not that.”
If life is meant to teach me lessons, then the only lesson I’ve learned is that it all had to happen the way it happened for me to be the person I am now, but how can I know what life is meant to do? All I can do is decide what it’s supposed to do.