Be The Unreliable Narrator

For those who have always felt deeply misunderstood and used every last breath to convey your Truth, this piece is for you. For those who have systems, friends, partners, and family members always asking you to explain yourself, to convince them of who you are and why you behave the way you, this piece is for you. You will never fully understand the truth of who you are because the truth is beyond “personality.” In fact, the truth is revealed only once the personality has been stripped away long enough for you to glimpse it. However, you will always wrestle with this personal self - the ego self - with its attractions and desires and validations and failures, its rights and wrongs, preferences and distastes. To know the Truth, you must be willing to accept that none of these things really define “you,” and in order to know thyself you must actually surrender to not knowing this personality. An easy example of this is comparing the 8 year old personality, whose likes included Pokemon, Harry Potter, and Cap’n Crunch, to the 33 year old personality, who does not eat cereal, reads different books, and has no more Pokemon cards (though would still enjoy the cereal, still thinks Pokemon is kind of cool, and definitely still loves Harry Potter… the books not the movies). Was I more myself at 8 years old or now? As you grow closer to the Truth of who you are and strip more of these layers away, your personality will change, your body will change, your mind will change, and others will not understand if they ever pretended to in the first place. Maybe you were more easily explainable as a child, though this is doubtful, but at least you were more easily observed. As an adult, you are expected to explain yourself, including all of your actions and intentions. But if you are honest, you cannot. Not really. You cannot even explain yourself to yourself. You have always been a mystery and a mystery you shall remain. This is the glorious truth of existence and the opportunity it presents - to embrace the mystery of who you are once you understand what you are. The “who” is an illusion while the “what” is an essence. Animals in the wild do not go about explaining themselves, trees do not list off their accomplishments and hobbies for validation (Ex. “anything but woodworking”). They simply are. What happens remains a surprise in a world full of surprises, while the essence of what they are is always known.

So much of the desire to understand is the human ego’s striving for control. If you feel you understand your self, your partner, and your family, your ego feels safe in the notion that its projections of these people align with its expectations. You may rely on all sorts of labels and conceptualizations - psychological, medical, and otherwise - to paint a vivid picture of who you and others are, but if someone deviates from these descriptions, as they are wont to do, the ego freak out! “How could you?! It is like I do not know you at all?!! WHO are you?!” There is no answer for such a question. As “The Who” sings, “Whooooo are you? Who, who, who, who? I really want to know….”

As long as you hold onto this question, your thinking mind will grip tightly to the answer until it is forcefully stripped away from you. Or if you do not know, you will struggle in your not knowing for as long as it takes to let go. I invite you to release this question and to let go of this construct altogether.

Be an unreliable narrator in the story of your life.

Be as curious and awe-struck as the reader, for you are both the writer and the reader. The miracle of existence is that you get to read the story as it is written and can be just as surprised as the audience! What a gift. You can apologize for your offenses and mistakes, celebrate your accomplishments and victories, lament your losses, and love and cherish your connections, just as everyone else does… all without attachment to a full understanding of who or why. The true complexity of who you are encompasses all of the interconnected universe of which you are a part. The context for your being is significantly more important than the content. You exist within concepts of time and space, which, in Ultimate Reality, fall away just as easily as your personal self. So let go of this need to explain yourself. There are an infinite amount of reasons and possibilities for the way that you are. Allow others’ avalanche of judgments to slide off of you like the rock fragments that they are and forgive them for only seeing pieces on the mountain. The recent motion picture Everything Everywhere All At Once attempts to capture the true context of ultimate reality with the framework of a metaverse. Attempting to track the happenings of this will scramble your brain in the most absurdist fashion. In this experience, all meaning falls away because the human brain is not equipped to make meaning out of everything all at once. Rather, the brain can only focus on a few things at once; like a movie frame, it brings certain things into focus and allows others to slip into the background. Over time, as you embrace more of your essence, your true nature may begin to shine through the transparency of your personality and others many see this more clearly as well. It can be felt from behind the eyes and within the energetic state of the body, even without such typical displays of character. The theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking still managed to convey his sense of humor through a text-to-speech device. With his mind very much intact, he learned the lesson that he was not merely a body; however, despite Hawking’s own atheistic perspective, even the mind could not fully capture the essence behind the personality of “Stephen.” Stephen was simply the vessel for the essence to shine through. Over time, others may accept you for the mystery - the vessel - that you are if you show them the way.

You may think you need to understand in order to love, but quite the contrary. To love only when you understand the self, the other, or the world, is to love only according to certain conditions. The minute or second you do not understand, you fall out of love. In practicing love without understanding is where find love without borders and without limits. None of this comes naturally since we all come into this world equipped with brain wiring for survival, but the closer we come to our essence, typically through difficult circumstance that challenges this wiring, the easier we see the fragility, the performance, of it all. This writing is not to shame your personality, after all, we all have one and we can play with it. On the contrary, I invite you to love your personality at a distance, the same way you might love a brilliant or tragic theatrical performance, both beautiful and flawed. Play with your personality like the actors at Chicago’s famous improv club, “Second City,” play with a character pulled from the audience at random. If you have been playing with your personality like a rigidly rehearsed Shakespearean actor until now, allow yourself to be surprised - to be the unreliable narrator for your character arc. From this place of un-knowing, there are no more mistakes and no more disappointments. Only the magic remains.