I think one of the worst things a person can do is lie to themselves. Lying to others is already bad enough, and to an extent, it can even be understandable why you have to do it. However, lying to yourself is a delusion that would never make sense, and so far, nothing tops it. You see all the signs, you see all the markers. You know very well what it means. Yet, you still go right ahead with it, hoping to get a different outcome.
As in, how exactly does that work? Because when you make the mistake of believing your own lies, you forget to prepare for the consequences. And then, you act shocked when it all hits you in the face. Soon enough, you start asking for advice, but by then it's usually always too late.
I read a story online about a woman who just left her abusive boyfriend. During their talking-stage, the guy made it clear that he was a firm believer in “disciplining” women who went against the rules he had laid out. And yeah, the discipline meant that he was definitely going to lay hands on them. As if, can a flag be more red at this point? Well, she decided to date him anyway, and less than a month later, the gbas gbos happened.
After the third time, she couldn’t bear it anymore, and she ran for her dear life. I know you’ll ask yourself, why did she choose to date him when he already told her the kind of person he was? On that? I guess I just don’t have the answer. No one should ever raise their hands towards another human being, but if someone tells you that’s their preferred lifestyle, should you still go ahead and be with them?
Well, I do know that humans love to believe what is most comfortable for them. And they’d believe whatever places them in a better light. Maybe she thought she was going to change him, maybe she thought she would tame him. She realized quickly that she was the one getting tamed, and she japa’d.
This works across all spheres, you see signs of something you don’t like, yet you go in with both feet, expecting to change them. Just like when a guy chooses to date a baddie, who made it clear to him that she can only be with fraudsters and politicians who can fund the kind of lifestyle that she has. You’re not a fraudster or a politician; you’re a civil servant, and your salary can be consumed in a single day by this baddie.
Yet, you think you stand a chance. You lie to yourself that you’ll change her, and make her see “reason”. But the only person who gets changed is you, because your name will be changed to Patient, which is what you’ll be called when you land in the hospital for a Heart Attack and High Blood Pressure.
It happens in places of worship, workplaces, with friends, families, and even strangers. We tell ourselves that we can do something, we know that we don’t like it, and we know we’re uncomfortable with it. But we fake it. Just because we want one tiny thing, we subject the rest of our lives to pain and torture. And when it finally goes crazy, we start wondering how we got there. We conveniently forget that we saw it all in HD, but we chose to ignore it. We forget that we really don’t have a defense because we would never have been in that situation if we had just told ourselves the damn truth.
Sometimes, society pressures us into making such decisions as well. But we have to learn to give society the middle finger, because in the end, society won’t be the one suffering for your bad decisions. You’ll be the only one in the hot seat. And that’s the fact! We need to do better.
