dis-il-lu-sion
i remember the first time someone told me that there was no such thing as santa claus. i was in my neighbor eddie’s back yard with a group of my friends, and i was probably 10 years old. joey, who was a few years older than the rest of us, broke the news. he stood on the concrete wall that stood in the back corner of the lot, like a preacher on a pulpit speaking to his flock. at first, i could not believe what he was saying. of course santa is real. my parent’s told me he was real. almost everyone i knew believed he was real. how could this be? but as he explained the logic to his declaration, my reality unraveled. it all made sense. how could i have been so blind? so foolish? my parents had lied! my family had lied! i was living a lie!
there is a certain feeling you get when you come to the realization that something you believed to be true, or took for granted to be true, proves to be otherwise. whether it is something as traumatic as learning that santa claus does not, in fact, bring you presents at christmas or something as simple as realizing that those pants do, in fact, make your ass look fat. there is something that comes with that realization that is unsettling, regardless of scale.
the feeling is magnified when it involves a person. we all have our perceptions of the people around us, some based on fact but most based on our brief interactions with these people who, as we all do sometimes, may put on the fact they want to show us instead of their true self. when that true self is finally revealed, the result can be devastating, particularly if you held that person in a certain regard. maybe you thought that a person was different from everyone else, only to learn that he or she is the same. maybe you thought that a person was the same as everyone else, only to learn that he or she was different.
a number of factors influence the impact of learning the truth. the closer a person is to you magnifies the hurt. the higher regard you had for the person magnifies the disappointment. the more you truly believed and truly wanted a person to be the way you thought them to be magnifies both.
is learning the truth better? could i really be a thirty-something who believes that santa is going to bring me that gift i have wanted for years and years (please, santa, please!)? there are obviously cases where the truth does set a person free, and the pain and disappointment are short lived.
but what about when the truth is not about saint nick? what if it is about someone in your family? someone you work with? someone you are attracted to? someone you are dating? these are very real people with very real, personal connections that may or may not have been built on those illusions of truth?
dis-il-lu-sion: to free of illusion.
i would hate to go through my life only to realize at the end that those relationships that i held most dear to me were anything less than genuine or based on anything other than the truth. i would not want to force myself to believe a lie simply to maintain a connection to a person. i would rather find out that the girl that i have had a crush on is not who i thought she was. i would rather find out that the coworker i looked up to is not any different than those coworkers that i do not look up to.
the truth shall set me free.