Stories and Honesty

The lie is so easy, it's so simple to tell ourselves stories that make us seem  more important, more vital to existence.  We tell ourselves stories to justify our positions, to make the inexplicable make sense.  These stories can make us the hero.

We are all the hero of our own stories.  As the information around Brian Williams keeps coming out and I'm sitting here watching American Sniper I keep thinking about honesty and the stores we tell ourselves.  In both cases Chris Kyle and Brian Williams are the hero of their own story. I honestly think that both men thought that they were telling all of the truth. 

What strikes me in both stories is that they are both amazingly impressive men.  Brian Williams was our voice in the news for the last decade, he worked hard to get where he was and somehow still felt it necessary to embellish stories that started true.  He was in a helicopter in Iraq getting the stories for us he just wasn't hit.  Still to be that close is a feat in and of its self.

I'm not interested in political debate about Chris Kyle, he was an American hero but he felt the need to embellish in his own life story to make himself look bigger and better. He wasn't satisfied with the truth, something in him, like Williams needed to be bigger.

This has been on my mind this morning a lot with looking at how we tell ourselves our stories.  Where Brian Williams and Chris Kyle told stories to make them 10 feet tall, the stories I tell myself are a bit different.  I am not going down a gender path here at all, I do embellish stories for effect. I love a good story and a laugh so I will stretch.  But the stories I'm most interested in are the ones that I tell myself.

We are not kind when it comes to telling our own stories.  I tell the story of the rape and it becomes I should have known better, that I was somehow at fault.  I tell the story of putting on weight as I'm lazy and it was the only way to comfort myself-that I don't deserve to reach out to people.  I don’t work out because I'm tired, my leg hurts and until Thursday it would kill me. 

Like Brian and Chris I know all of my public stories and I believe them, I'm fine, life is wonderful, I'm training for a marathon again.  Like them I will have to come up with a new story when something ends up not true, or I could tell the truth now.

The truth is, life is hard.  Life isn't always wonderful. Sometimes the only comfort we can find is by admitting weakness and reaching out to friends (thank you Monica and Sohp).  I want to be training for the Omaha 1/2 and will keep talking about it. 

Something about admitting this out loud bends my normal story and for today, life is wonderful and I have comfort.