Deconstructing The Myth

Let me share a story about a friend of mine. This friend of mine not so long ago commented on the eve of celebrating 30 years with the same firm how much he felt like a failure. "Look at me, everyone wants to congratulate me, celebrate my achievements, but I feel like hiding in shame.  I am an impostor to myself.  I settled for a second-rate life.  Sold my soul for security, with my second-rate career, my second-rate wife and my second-rate house."  He fell silent and then took a long swig at his tequila.  I looked at him and smiled while I considered his situation.

Indeed, what was he supposed to do with such an excruciating awareness?  Well, contrary to what you may think, I hurried to congratulate him. At first he looked at me askance, displeased with the lightness with which I was responding to his despair.  I explained to him that by looking back at his life with crippling sorrow, he was closing the doors on many other opportunities.  But he had crafted such a cast-in-iron story that he was playing his part to support it only too well.  My aim was not to prove him wrong but to support him, gain his trust, and then usher him towards some other possible scenarios. So entrenched in his despair he was that I took the lead to show that maybe he had reached the end of a life cycle and, if that was the case, he could look forward to anticipating some kind of new beginnings.  He didn't shrug his shoulders or walk away, but he made some comments.  Exhausted himself in explaining why all was too late, impossible, and how the future looked really bleak from his windows.  Then he fell silent, mulling.

It takes an extraordinary level of awareness and character strength not to be affected by long-lasting negative circumstances.  So feeling victimized, alone in the world, unable to take action, depleted of hope, bankrupted emotionally, paralyzed by predicaments and forces beyond our control, is only natural.  The worst thing you can do is go after yourself for having the feelings you are experiencing.  So if you catch yourself suffering, procrastinating to act, and resisting changes out of fear, you know where you have landed.  Being unemployed for a long time, for example, working in the same dead-end position year after year, or chasing the same illusive dreams, favor such mental downfalls and take a serious toll on the health, especially when a lack a social and emotional support is chronic.

It took my friend a while to break through the thickness of resistance, fear and certainties he had grown used to.  Despite his second-rate outlook, he was way more courageous than he ever knew.  His spirit was still alive within him.  He just needed to reclaim it.  Today he turned his life around. Shortly after our meeting, he enrolled into a university and completed a MA in Environmental Studies.  Last time we met, he sounded and moved like a different man . . .

All this is not quite true.  Because the friend in question is me.  And this was just a sample of story I am so eager to play to myself on the giant Imax screen in my mind.  I am so broken, so unable to differentiate between reality and fiction; so emotionally, physically, socially, and spiritually battered, that I feel like the classic Hollywood hero who mistook his own tail and chased it around thinking he was living a fairy tale.  I stopped believing completely.  I am just here and now. And nothing else.  


Now, how many of you out there fell for this lovely uplifting story of mine, sucked all the juice out of it? Well, if you're one of them, let explain to you the meaning of cacophonia. I know it's not a word. Precisely.