Challenge: Speaking Honestly...

We all hide.

Its hard to write honestly when everything you are is screaming down at you.

Its harder still to realise that, you are not alone in living the lie. That you and your parents and family and extended family, community, society and, in actual fact, entire species, is living lies.
It can't be helped though. We are who we are because we allow ourselves to be created as such. Bend and broken circles made to fit in a square shaped hole. And the more we try to fight it, the smaller and tighter that square hole becomes.

This lesson is like many learnt in life. Not one that you actually ever fully learn, but rather one that you revisit through many little reveals. Like Ellipsis... there are repeated stops before the complete mark is understood.

But I digress.

I remember when I first began to learn this. And that was when I was about eleven. Now as most eleven years old, I am willing to admit my awareness of, well anything, cannot be solely counted upon fully, But I remember clearly an experience of my life at that moment that marked my conscious so much so that to that moment I attribute much of my post awareness.

I remember that it was after a particularly taxing game of chase or touchers or something close to that type of interpreted games, In the last year of my spell at Rivonia Primary School. Grade 5. I had, over the course of my time there managed, surprising even to myself, accumulate a nice enough group of friends and had, in that final year, developed a new, best friend.

It was the first time I realised that you could in fact have more than one Best Friend.

But I Digress

After the game I remember that i was suppose to walk to my moms work, she worked across the road at the Village Pre-Primary, and I remember that during the walk I reflected on the game and the fun I had had with Lwazi and the other guys. Lwazi was one of the first friends that I can remember who, was more than a nice person, but rather that he was also smart and well spoken. And more than that it was with him that I was able to develop my love for talk. Not just the normal nonsense, although we did talk a lot of that, but more that we were able to engage in ideas. Silly ideas, but ones which had to be constructed and hashed out. Why I would make a better Will Smith than him. How Luke Skywalker would always kick Han Solo's ass. So on and so forth I will not bore you with the details.

Although, I do make an awesome Will Smith.

But I was remembering some of the game when I realised that I was, at the same time, remembering something else. It was another memory that seemed to flood into my brain at the time. Now looking back, with the hindsight that these lessons and experiences have given me now, I am able to break down probably why such thoughts were occuring, but at the time I did not understand. I can only recount the events and what took place.

I was crossing the walk way, over the Rivonia Road. When I remembered our old house. Now this is a miracle in and of itself, as I honestly do not possess access to any, save three memories of me being younger than six/seven. I cant even tell you which ages I am at those times, I only know that I was younger based upon the parental recollection adding context to my memory. But I remembered my old house.

It was only a scene, a single scene in my head that kept coming back to me. Of my dad walking through a dome brick archway into the lounge type of room. I remember the scene as clear as day. Remember Storm and Shadow outside. Remember the little spinning clock that sat on my mothers counter, and the Donald Duck picture with the yellow frame hanging in my room. I remember the layout of my room in that scene. A small room that walked out into the lounge. Thus creating what would be the starting point of this memory.

But then I remembered something else. That this scene never existed. I remember my dad walking into the room, but I was suddenly confounded when I remembered that there is a picture of my dad walking into a room, under the arch way. And I have that scene saved as that picture in my head. Whenever I think back to that I realise that, that memory does not exist.

My room exists, and my Donald Duck picture exists. I know the dogs existed, even if I cannot picture them. But that scene, that scene does not really have any reality in my true life. And how do I know this. Because I remembered asking my mom about the photo, and my mom saying that, it was before my time.

This, and as I have found, is one example of the many moments that I have found my memories to be brought under suspicious of tampering. The brain and mind is an amazing tool, its capable of coping so long as things are saved and or constructed in or to be coherent.

My first memories are not of my whole family, but are of my family being split up. being broken. And my being, in order to cope with that, took fragments and sites, pictures, to construct memories to make what trauma existed to not exist any more. The real memories are there still but they are hidden, and possibly for ever.

So I have digressed, but what does this have to do with Lying to yourself.

Well everything and nothing at the same time. We create stories to try and explain things in our lives and in the world around us. We create scenarios and relationships because we observe reactions and create judgments on them based on our observation. The trouble is that, all of them are based of preconceived ideals and values. Rather than accepting the more disappointing reality, we choose the safer satisfying delusion.

This is our greatest fault. Without a doubt, the experience of it all matter more than the event itself, for the experience is who we are. But we look through it all with rose tinted glasses, always softening the blow and making life better or worse than what it actually is.

Pain is discredited and pleasure is chased, but not in the ways that would be actual and beneficial. But rather with methods that make them worse. We destroy ourselves from within, and using that value system, destroy those around us from without.

We struggle to look at the facts. And so we lie. Lie to ourselves, to our parents, to our friends and our children. All in the name of having a life that gives you what you want, when in reality, you don't even know what you want.

I have no solution here, only hope, that one day, we can shed off our skin and enjoy the life we have, not persistently pining for a better one.