My narratives about the way life is, about the way other people are, are just scripts to protect me from really feeling and from really examining my life. These stories I make up about myself, about others and about the world are the way I protect myself from disappointment and sadness. These feelings then pass by underneath the stories I make up, like a subterranean river with waters that never feel the light of the sun. Unexamined and underground, the defeated expectations of my dreams are transmuted into disillusionment and bitterness, the diluted secondary emotions which are the decayed byproducts of my original disappointment. As a salve against the more vulnerable feelings of sadness, I invent a formula about what a dirty, unfair game life is. The formula is made of excuses and reasons that almost always begin with the question Why. Why me? Why is life this way? These persistent complaints: If only I would’ve been treated differently as a child . . . are inevitably coupled with a fixed way of being: an excuse not to try. These complaints are like lines in a scene, which I construct into Acts within a play. They become stories about the way I think life is, about how others are, about what the world is and how it usually treats me unfairly on some level.
I’m at my least impactful when I collapse myself into these excuses. I’m at my worst when I’m unable to distinguish my true identity – my true self – from these stories. It takes great courage to live authentically instead of from a made-up program of what I think life is. When I live life from excuses and justifications, I’m not very powerful. The honest alternative is to live in the ever-present Now. It’s much more comfortable, in the short run, to live today as a rerun of yesterday, projecting a miserable if comforting and predictable past onto the blank slate of the present, rather than creating today as a brand-new show without an ending that I already know and borrow from yesterday. Yet that’s the only true definition of life. Every substitute for an authentic creation in the Now just ends up being another synthetic story. I can be my stories, or I can be me.
© 2022 by Michael C. Just
Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.
You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23
Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002
Four of his short stories have recently been published online:
Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)
The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW
I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October
Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within