Telemachus Rising (16 page)

I had deluded myself.  I had lived my life through a filter.  Everything I saw and heard, I filtered and reframed to fit my worldview.  In a time of difficulty and instability, I made sense of my life my reinterpreting and re-imagining it.  My perception was completely skewed.  It had happened slowly, gradually.  That's why I hadn't noticed.  At first, when things were relatively simple, I didn't have to do much to reconcile the way things were with the way I thought they should be.  But over time, as life got more complicated, I continued to make the adjustments automatically.  The substitution of delusion for reality happened incrementally.  I didn't realize I was doing it.  The biggest lie I had told myself?  That I was the hero.  The good guy.  That because my choices made sense in my own mind, they were objectively sensible choices.  That's how I'd gotten to where I was, to my current state of misery.

There was some relief in putting words to it, to understanding the process.  But where did that leave my memories?  Days, weeks, months, I'd lived a filtered life.  I'd seen what I wanted to see and believed what I wanted to believe.  In my mind I had been a victim of fate.  Life had treated me unfairly.  If that wasn't the way events had really unfolded, then what was the truth of the matter?  It's not like I could go back.  I couldn't undo the mistakes I had made.  I wasn't even sure what all of them had been.  Looking back, it was impossible to sort it all out.

The web of cause and effect, motive and misunderstanding was too complicated, and my memories were too significantly compromised.  How can you tell the difference between rationality and rationalization?  How do you define harm in a world of moral relativism?  Is it even possible to measure wrongdoing in the absence of physical evidence?  What about when the damage is self inflicted?  I didn't know how to begin answering those questions.  It felt as if I'd been cut adrift.  There was no clear solution, nothing I could do to fix my old mistakes.  All I could do was take responsibility for my actions.  Whether the past was what I remembered or not, whether the future was fixed or full of possibility, I had to start somewhere.  I had to learn what I could from my own foolishness and try not to let it happen again.  I would write it down, all of it.  Everything I remembered about the critical moments, the points of inflection, the most severely compromised memories.  Maybe then I could go back and learn something.  Maybe then, moving forward, I could begin to see the world for what it was, instead of what I wanted it to be.

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