Monday, May 16, 2011

The stories we tell........


While surfing the internet, this is what I came across, "We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for." 


And I read it twice, then one more time, then one more time and then yet again ! This statement is the exact antithesis of the more "cool" and popular statement, " I am what I am".  Not many of us have the courage to admit that "I am what I would want people to think I am". I talk not what I want to, but what I think is appropriate; I live not the way I want to but what others approve of; I work on not what I have a passion for but what is "acceptable"..... and ultimately I become not what I am inside of me but like the one who's on the other side of the mirror ! 


I find it annoying when people make assumptions about me. Why? Not because the assumptions challenge my identity but because they put a doubt over the image of mine that I portrayed until now; the image that I thought is the "real me". It's kind of strange how we sometimes get stuck up with our own self-created mirage. We stare at it for so long that we convince ourselves of its "imaginary reality"  and decide to live with it for the rest of our lives, believing and proclaiming, "THIS IS ME" !


But just like the delusion of a mirage breaks sooner or later and makes way for the true reality to emerge, so does it happen with us. To take it from a famous Abraham Lincoln quote, you can fool all the people some of the time, you can fool some people all the time.....extending it to saying that you can probably manage to fool all the people all the time and  even fool yourself for sometime. But there comes a time when you feel, "this is it, who am I kidding" ! And this is the time when the mirage vanishes, the mirror breaks and you find yourself standing against the wall. And then you have to see inwards.......And it is then when you have to put together the different parts of the story that you have been telling everyone all this while. 


As you do this, you realize that unknowingly, inadvertently you changed protagonist of your story. He/She transformed into an explanation, a justification of your story; not an active part of it. But there's still time, there is always time..... it's like, "picture abhi baaki hai, mere dost !" And you start with a new story, a story where "YOU ARE WHAT YOU ARE" and in this script you don't explain but ASSERT......yes, this is what I was and this is what I will be .............

2 comments:

  1. A very true piece of writing.... I can completely relate all the things... Like ur work.... Keep it up...

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  2. An honest post but then as you rightly said "picture abhi baaki hai" and that remains as true even when you start a new story where "You are what you are"; at the end of the day this again is a story. The problem that is associated with such self discovery when our age old beliefs about ourselves are broken, when we are shaken out of our shell, is that we again get caught up in a hallucination of the newly discovered self being the ultimate truth only to be humbled some time later and realize that this was yet another story. We don't have a unique identity and our identity changes with time...

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