When I was nineteen
When we’re stuck in one particular narrative, it often takes a major life event to open our eyes to the other stories. When I was young, I was firmly in the grasp of Business As Usual. I didn’t question the path I was on. I believed what I was told, and I thought that most people were like me. It took a two-year bad relationship to change my worldview.
I was nineteen, just starting my second year of college. We dated, and she lied to me. A lot. About almost everything: who she was, what she felt, why she needed money…
And I went along with her lies for way too long. There’s a fine line between believing a lie and going along with one. In both cases, we’re accepting it without question, but to go along with a lie, some part of us has to recognize it for what it is. Looking back, I can remember times when my intuition was screaming at me, trying to get my attention. My intuition knew about the lies, but I blocked it out. I told it to go away because I had decided that I was going to see this thing through no matter what.
These days, “no matter what” is one of the red flag phrases that I’m wary of. “No matter what” means that our mind is closed. We’re no longer listening for the subtle signals that we might be on the wrong track. It’s right up there with “always” and “never” and other indicators of unwarranted certainty.
Lies get their power from the people who believe them, and I was eager to believe. Some hidden part of me needed so much to be loved and to be seen as special in her eyes, that I was willing to sacrifice truth to keep her around.
It hit me that I wasn’t a victim of that relationship, I was a co-conspirator. I had believed every crazy thing she told me, alienated myself from friends and family, and hurt people that I love. I wanted those things to be her fault, but to blame her I had to lie to myself. I decided I didn’t want to do that any more.
After that, I didn’t trust anyone, especially myself. For years, I stayed guarded, not wanting to be fooled again. I was in college, which, if you don’t know, is a great place to stoke a sense of self-righteous anger at how the world is being run. Clearly, the world was being run into the ground, and my generation was going to have to pull it back from the brink. I was living the Great Unraveling.